


i know there is more to our story

by Ler



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallout, F/M, LW!Bog, courier!Marianne
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 01:07:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12470088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ler/pseuds/Ler
Summary: The greatest difference, they both decided --in their own time and space, measuring, carefully, their histories and consequences, and still, coming back to that indescribable moment when their eyes met [at last] -- is to know, when to run from, and when to run to.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SilverSie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverSie/gifts).



> In my defense I didn’t plan for this tumblr ask (jfc sometimes I’m reminded that this was just an ask. One ask. FUCK) to become so bloated and tl;dr and a sort of a fic? I’m sorry but this is what it is now. A giant mini-novel fic clusterfuck.

And here is the part no one will ever know - 

  
  
  
  


The Lone Wanderer is  **someone** before Marianne is old (smart, wise, battered, scarred,  _ dead _ ) enough to be  _ something _ \- 

 

in the beginning, _no,_ _from the very start_ , Marianne is the lowest denominational value, and all she can do is to listen - to the stories, where _the best ones_ are about the Man Who Walks Alone, the Water-bringer, the Bog Walker - and _to_ _dream -_

 

(oh but if she knew the difference between voices and words, if only she would have figured, which told lies, which told nothing at all,  _ and which one was hers _ , Marianne would have pieced together the most basic of truths that when you  _ are _ the bottom, all you can do is go up, it’s all just a matter of time, and maybe this would have been a completely different story about a completely different girl) -

 

and from beyond the Divide, the Far Coast, come flying tales of The Courier Six,  _ ballsiest fucker that side of the Wastes _ , and that You Don’t Fuck with a Person who Brings You Your Mail, especially after that person wins a war of snipers, slavers and automatons, and He weaves them into a person, of flesh and blood and spite, and  _ doesn’t feel alone _ \- 

 

\- But that part comes much  _ much _ later. 

  
  
  
  
  


In the beginning, the Lone Wanderer is a ragged desert warrior type, hat riding low on his brow, with a shotgun and a hunting rifle - cause that’s what Marianne would chose, so why wouldn’t he? Handsome, tall, broad shoulders, impeccably dressed -  _ later _ ( _ mouth full of sand, her shoes worn to a hole, eyes dried up no matter how much she blinks _ ) she would realize how stupid of an idea that was - coming into town through desert storms, and being so perfectly authoritative, commanding, demanding respect. Someone who she would look into the face and see a miracle-worker that he was. 

 

[Someone who would take her with him, away from whiskey and gambling and whores, and feuding caravan companies, and into something Other. The Great Unknown Beyond Rocks and Sand and CIty Walls. Someone, much like Roland - if Roland wanted to leave, and not rule, rich, powerful, over all of it. She doesn’t know it yet. She will be too late to find out.]

  
  


“I talked to the caravaners today,” she says on the roof on their “home” over a brahmin steak Roland  _ generously _ treats her to - not at the Strip though, they don’t go there together, they never do. “Rumor has it, the Wanderer went to the Pitt.” 

“What’s that?” He asks absently, scratching dirt from under his nails with a tip of a knife. It’s a new one, a shiny toy from Miguel’s. Not like they can afford anyone else’s stuff, but he says things are picking up. He says, straightening his checkered black’n’white suit Dawn spend weeks working on (for free, of course, she wouldn’t charge her future brother-in-law, would she?)

“The Wanderer, you know? I told you about him-”

“I know, some fictional guy you filled your pretty little head with,” he messes her hair, like one would pet a stray mutt. His smile is affectionate, but she can tell, there is something not quite right with it. “You don’t want to make me feel jealous by any chance, do you?”

She swallows a piece of overcooked meat, stuck painfully in her throat. “He is real. Legendary, but real.” And then, wistfully, eyes strained to look over the roofs and the makeshift walls of the Westside, to where the roads, deteriorated with fallout and time slowly gave to the scorching yellow desert, full of scorpions, and ghouls, and an occasional deathclaw. Her world. The shitty one. The dangerous one. “I hope to meet him one day.”

“Let’s just focus on what’s important, right, babydoll?” Roland’s smile is bigger, shiny like the Strip at its midnight glory of lights. The Strip never sleeps. “How is your courier thing going? Getting a number soon?” 

 

And like that they switch the topic, but the Desert never forgets. 

 

Marianne, on the other hand,  _ does _ , a bullet lodged in her brain, her grave shallow and her life depending on the kindness of strangers, who don’t care about no platinum chip (that is not a chip at all) she has to carry in her pocket but not anymore.

 

 

 

Marianne forgets: 

her sister, with blond curls and a lightest skin she has ever seen on a Vegas inhabitant; 

Sunny, who tried to court her, and Marianne has nothing against that, all things considered, he is a good match for her, shuffling cards in the Tops; 

her father’s grave, a wooden cross on a hill overlooking Vegas, away from the radscorpions and raiders, buried together with his caravan trading dreams and a remainder of good name their family had left to even get her into Couriers. 

Her mother’s smile.

 

Marianne forgets even Roland’s name, and just remembers the damn suit, black and white, and her own fucking pistol, the meager equipment provided to her for this mission, pressed to the slope of her skull. 

  
  


 

But she is Marianne, and she is Courier Six, and she remembers what it’s like to be angry and betrayed. Vengeance, Marianne discovers, tastes like deathclaw omelette, which she has for breakfast 20 minutes after she shoots Roland in the face.

 

 

 

“ **Babydoll this** ”. 

Her newly acquired cocktail dress, with fancy purple polkadot pattern on a bell-shaped skirt, its swing around her knees flirty and at times inappropriate, is covered with specks of fresh blood, and she raises her glove-clad hand - also new, this whole outfit costed her an arm and a leg, but it’s the Strip, and on the Strip, you have to look the part - to wipe the most astray splatter of her cheek. Around her, people are screaming - women mostly, and from behind the front counter Sunny’s eyes are like two brown saucers.

“Marianne, WHAT THE HELL?!” He runs to her, skipping and bumping against people getting in his way. “When I let you bring that gun-”

“What  _ did _ you think would happen, Sunny?”

Judging by his face, definitely not this. 

“Marianne, you need to LEAVE.” He grabs her hand and starts dragging her towards the exit. “Go home, go to Dawn. I’ll try to smooth this over, but I don’t know. Hey,” he laughs, not an ounce of humor to him. “I might even lose my job now.”

“Wait,” she pulls back. Roland is a mess, a red blot on his forehead oozing with maroon, and she leans by his leg, gingerly and reluctantly patting down his sides. After all, there was a reason beyond payback for her masterful headshot. Now the  _ second _ one -  **that’s all her** . “You might not even need it anymore.”

The chip is in his inside pocket. Somehow, Marianne notes with disappointment, she thought it would be more challenging. 

“Yeah, let’s go,” she turns and starts marching towards the exit without giving her ex’s cooling body a last farewell look. “I have a killer recipe and a couple of Deathclaw eggs that are asking to be cooked. You know, in celebration of me being not dead.”

  
  


What comes next is a whole different mess: NCR and Ceasar and killer robots, old world tech, in between. Marianne forgets things, but they starts coming back, and better, newer ones, come with them: Theo of the Brotherhood, a short skinny guy, all smiles and stutters and joyful curiosity, in a huge suit of metal power armor with little colorful frogs painted on the breastplate and it’s the cutest shit she has ever seen; Steph Cassidy, fire-headed and loud and trader savvy stout brickhouse of a woman, because only a bullet stops a caravaner from counting caps; Boone, whose action spoke much louder than his words, a living proof that there is no such thing as an ex-sniper; ED-E and the Flight of Valkyries blasting through its speakers; nightkin Lizzie with green skin and ridiculous mascara and an incredible hat; even Marianne’s own albino Dog, with a see-through head and a metal paw -

 

(what Marianne doesn’t say - not to Dawn, not to anyone, except Doc Mitch, and then, years later, to a man she used to imagine in the light of the Vegas night - is that not all of her scars are from gunfights and rad poisonings, and that sometimes you need to touch her a little harder for her to feel beneath the mesh under her skin, or that her lungs at times collapse like they should, rubbery and wrong, two balloons in her chest filling and shivering). 

 

Marianne knows not to get attached: what little the Wasteland gives, it can easily take away. It doesn’t care, if it’s your friend, your lover, your sibling, your unborn child. Marianne tries not to get attached. But even if she forgot things - her childhood toys, who she wanted to be when she grew up (definitely not the new owner, no,  _ leader _ of the Free City of New Vegas, that’s what) - she remembers to be fiercely, violently protective. 

 

And also, and that crushes upon her in a sudden avalanche of revelation when the jukebox in the lobby of  _ her _ casino switches gear, reviving the King of Pop, Marianne remembers that she  **loves music** .

 

She collects vinyl  _ maniacally _ . Sunny manages to scrape up a turntable, an old battered box with broken lights, but an intact needle, and fixes it up, meticulously, in the night, while Marianne pretends she still remembers how to sleep. 

She proceeds to work it to the bone, because maybe if she does, the Dessert will  _ shut the hell up. _

  
  


(the Dessert calls to her, as if a part of her was still buried somewhere there and she has to find it, radiation seeping into her skin, mouth doing dry from dehydration, sand filling her eyes)

(they call it the Desert Madness, and it comes without chems or mutations - simply because you’ve been  _ out there _ for too long, sometimes you get a feeling like you need to walk back into the Wasteland and never return)

(the Wasteland doesn’t care, if you are a sibling, a lover, a friend - when something is given, it should be returned)

 

( _ the Wasteland is a lover that will never let you go _ )

  
  


Sunny also fixes her up with a  **van** \-  _ runs on nuclear cores _ , he says, looking worse for wear in messy overalls with stains so deep no abraxo would take them out, a couple of large salvaged batteries weighing him down. He presents it to her on her 3rd birthday, the new one, the only one that matters, and if she still remembered how to cry, she would have done that. She settles on smooching her brother-in-law on the forehead. The player is reluctantly stuffed in the back - “ _ Just... be safe, Marianne. Also, as impressive as it is with you hiking the desert on foot, this is faster. And you don’t have to sleep on the ground anymore, and them lockers - ain’t it great _ ” - together with a box full of plastic circles, bought, won in blackjack, bargained for till she was raw in the throat, and she only gets the ignition keys when she swears not to ride off into the sunset immediately. 

  
  


Marianne rides off into the sunrise instead, when the lights of Vegas switch off in a loud chain of ringing claps, and the robots patrol the streets, not empty even at the morning’s dawn. She rides out into the sunrise and drives as fast and as far as she can, until radio Vegas loses signal, and she turns on the records behind her back. She drives slower then, mindful of scratches, radroaches and kazadors slamming into her enforced windshield. Her Dog snores softly on the cot, only because the mutt caught her on her way out and started whining. 

Except she is not going to the desert. Not yet.

  
  


Marianne drives West.

She drives past the dried-up lakes, whatever left of them becoming irradiated sludge, and further, to the signals in the wilds that her Pipboy receiver catches. To the private bunkers, abandoned, compromised, forgotten, with occasional mutant or raider about. Marianne shoots and loots. And then shoots and loots some more. She rides over the mountain ranges and listens to her tunes sitting on the edge with a can of pineapples and a desert post-apocalyptic sky above, while Dog hunts lizards and geckos. 

And she is  _ content _ .

Marianne drives towards the sun, towards legends and tales and mysteries unbound. And, because Marianne is a  _ Courier _ , she maps the world, for caravans and travelers, which roads work and which don’t, and where creatures nest, and villages sprawl, their inhabitants eyeing her with worried faces. She buys and sells cheap, food, supplies, water, stimpacks, catches up on news, and goes on, picking up mail on her way for free  _ if it’s on her way _ \- because that is what she does, this is what she knows how to do. 

 

(And once, through a thick brawl of the innkeeper, she hears the tale that The Wanderer - it has such a ring to it, she sighs, and remembers something, not details, but a feeling, a slight sting in her chest and a turn in her stomach, but she doesn’t linger on it - who got lost along the way. Some say he never made it out of the Pitt, some say the swamps swallowed him whole, some, and this one is the best, that he was abducted by _‘ell ‘naws wat._ _Aliens and such. Esstraterrestials like._ Marianne just laughs and buys another whiskey for the story. She tells her own, of ghouls who wanted to go to the moon, of a man inside the machine and of talking to her own asshole of a brain.) 

 

(there was a saying she heard so long ago, that you either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain. Well, Marianne lived longer. 

-it’s a great realisation of a lifetime, grand in theory, but in this case small enough to fit in a space between her breastbone and the underside of her chin, pressing against her esophagus to render her mute, that Marianne lived long enough to become  **Someone** as well-

Well,  _ fuck _ , Marianne  _ stubbornly _ lived long enough to become a Legend.)

  
  
  


“Girl, them tales of The Courier ain’t news here. And you ain’t got the walk for that talk.” 

(Something drops in her gut and stays there, where she can’t find it and pick it back up.)

  
  


(With a rainbow-blue carnival glass in her hand, Marianne becomes a  _ ghost _ .)

  
  
  


But she explores. And she follows leads, follows stories, follows rumors.

 

This is how Marianne finds Ghoul Central. When she finds it, it is called Vault 71. 

And to her immediate regret, it’s open.

 

 


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but please don't shoot me.

Dog raises its head, its brain sloshing in a jar, and whines questionably. 

“Stay,” she mumbles, and checks her note, crumpled, and straightened and crumpled again, a rough map of bracket corridors, zigzag stairs and boxed rooms, and a big fat cross that has “Recreation” over it.  _ Recreation _ \- that what they called it, dancing, and card-playing, and billiards - back in the world a war away. 

And  _ music _ , that’s what they called music. 

Marianne digs her hand in her utility belt and pulls out a handful of bullets, all hand-made (mercy on Sunny and all the children he is going to have with her sister, he managed to fit in a weapons bench in the back, granted a small one, and it saved Marianne’s life a dozen times already), counts them. 

“Guard the car.” Rifle over one shoulder, shotgun over another, a duffle back over the the whole ordeal - and she’s ready. She takes one step before something hot and wet licks her fingers. It’s slimy and gross and Marianne wipes it against her pants, before sitting down with a sigh to have her face assaulted in a similar manner. “Good Dog, yes, you are a good dog. Now stay.”

 

Dog stays with a bark. And Marianne steps into the cave - it’s always a cave, or a sewer with those faults, as if humans were nothing more than rats, as if it they counted only nominally, a number of souls to a number of cots - and a silently turning white light in the deep, like sign of disappointment to come.

One of the first rules of vault-crawling that Marianne learned: there is always something in there with you. Could be something as simple as insects. Could be much worse. Could be people that live there. Could be people that  _ used _ to live there, but not anymore. Or  _ not people  _ anymore. Anyway: don’t forget your gun and ammo.

Second rule: READ EVERYTHING. Scraps of paper, notes on lockers, signs on the walls, especially if they are yellow or red and say danger. Always read terminals: work notes, diary logs, correspondence. It may save your life.

Third rule: forget half of the stuff you find out. Spit it out of your mind, drown it with alcohol, and follow up with jet or whatever you’re into. Forget about the one with just children in it, forget about the one with one woman and a hundred men, forget the one man and a thousand women, maybe remember the one with a panther (because that is actually quite funny), forget the one with cloning, the other with drugs in the air, forget the spore one ( _ your lungs will never forget _ ), the brainwashing, and especially the ones that had nothing wrong with them at all, except for the worst flaw of them all: human nature and being stupid enough to open doors that were not meant to be opened to people who were definitely not your friends. She saw those, with wall drawings in human blood and heads on spikes. No wonder she didn’t sleep at night. Sounds better than nightmares. It’s funny how things we want to forget the most can never quite leave us.

Rule number four: Vaults ran on radiation, so it’s probably Ghouls. How many - that’s just luck. 

 

Marianne counts her chances. Marianne miscalculates (rarely).

 

She makes it to the third level, stepping over glowing piles of dust among piles of dead rabid ghouls, and smoking holes in the walls - not the Enclave, please, she can’t deal with the Enclave right now - and into a round room that was supposed to be the cantine: as dirty gray as the rest of the place, but semi-large, with metal benches lining the walls, and long tables, shrewd and overturned and placed in makeshift barricades in front of the two adjacent doors, one on the right, another on the left. 

There are bones. Human bones. Quite a few. 

But also a couple of ammo boxes, which she shuffles through, stuffing good bullets into her pants and the bad ones in the bag - recycling is your key to success here. 

It’s quiet, too quiet. Marianne unfolds her paper again. If she didn’t get lost (and she did that a couple of times, thankfully not while she was running away from things) she is two-thirds of her way there. Left, then down two rooms, cut through the med wing - look for syringes, medkits, anything - then down the stairs, through dorms-

  
  


Except then, there is an  **Explosion** . 

  
  


It shudders the ground under her feet, something collapsing up ahead, beyond the walls, and takes her aback, the cushion of her skinny backside painfully dampening her fall. 

Electricity wheezes from the right, and only then Marianne understands that the ambient groan she keeps hearing is NOT the sound of a slowly suffocating ventilation system, but something ELSE. And it approaches, with a choir of growls and wheezing, and a sound or running footsteps echoing in the tunnel of the corridor, accompanied by claws against the tiling. 

Sounds like someone did not expect ghouls. 

Marianne scrambles and crouches behind the barricade, shotgun at ready. Could not be many - should not be many, this Vault is not that big, the barrel trails at the expanse of the barely lit doorway, as the noise approaches, feet slapping into the metal floor with a stubborn weight. 

Yes, a man. One man. One man with energy weapons, zapping behind his back and swearing, loudly. As if he wants them to follow him. As if-

The first one to come at her is… a  **Dog** . It’s almost like her Dog, but not albino, and not in a mismatched mess of implant modifications - but it’s very much Her Dog. It skids on its hind legs, as confused by her as she is by it, but there is no time, since next come the footsteps and tall silhouette of a man, a thunder cloud of a mouse gray dust cape flying around his wide shoulders, misty welding goggles, endless legs in a give-away blue of a vault-suit tucked into worn army boots, and he is made of limbs, all of them  _ long _ .

The man almost trips over his dog. Length of limbs aside, apparently he isn’t in very good control of them.

“Fuck, Dogmeat,  **not now** !” He roars, grabing against the side of the door, and swings on his incredibly long outstretched arm, inertia slamming him into the switch, proceeding to slowly slip down on the ground, as the locking mechanism clicks into movement. Just in time, it has to be said. A glowing body barely manages to leap from behind the corner, letting out a heart-wrenching screech, and it’s sickly green arm, with bits dangling off, stretches forward, at her,  _ at her, _ and then… falls, with a creak of a breaking bone, being crushed between the thick cast panels.

The man leans his head back, knocking it against the wall, long legs kicking forward and out, exhausted. 

“See? I told you, nothing to worry about,” he harks breathlessly, pulling down the scarf from his mouth, thin, wide, crookedly smiling with warm and relieved youthful joy, despite the gaunt weather-licked face with pointy long chin it is set upon. 

His Dog barks, looking at her. Its tail wags, like a silly mutt it is. 

“Sorry, what was that?” the man continues to undress with heavy pants, hood pulled back from short messy copper hair and high forehead, and goggles tugged off, their circles imprinted upon his high defined cheekbones, dark eyebrows, the narrow bridge of a long sharp crooked nose. Hand in fingerless leather gloves raises to rub at it. “I think you meant, ‘Yes, Bog, you totally had that under control. Should never have doubted you’.”

The ball of at the pit of Marianne’s stomach tells her she is staring at all the wrong things: not a huge laser gun on his lap, or the scars and burns, acid no doubt, in lace on his jaw and up across his features, or even a knife tucked in his army boots and his fine black leather jacket (polished, clean,  _ cherished _ ). And yet, she can’t look away. For some reason, she’s just not able to. Doesn’t stop her from pointing her weapon at him. 

The man seems to finally catch his breath. “No need to pout,” he smirks, finally opening his eyes, that are as blue as his outfit, or maybe the color of the ocean. Maybe. Marianne never saw the ocean. Only heard that it was like an upside-down sky. “You deserve a nice-”

The man stares down the barrel of her gun, then, in a swift hop - straight into her eyes. Dark eyelashes cut over his pupils, in flexing cheekbones his face becomes of sharp angles and sour realizations. His next word comes out like a discharge of a sniper rifle. 

“ _ Fuck _ .”

  
  


She lowers her shotgun only after the promises given (and received) that she ain’t gonna shoot him. He speaks funny, stranger than anyone she ever met, with purring  _ r _ ’s and soft barely uttered  _ ha _ ’s to his syllables. He is  _ familiar _ , a scavenger like her, yet so foreign, as if the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes hide more mileage in them than she supposes. 

And that is sort of enough for her lips to curl at him. 

  
  
  


“Well, it was nice meeting you, Bog,” she nods, taking note that it surprises him at how casually she says his name after hearing it just once - he doesn’t know, Marianne is a  _ sharp clever girl _ , in Mojave those are the ones that stay alive. “But I have a corridor to explore.”

“If you mean that one over there,” his chin jerks towards the other of the two remaining ways. “I’m afraid to disappoint you.”

“What?” If her head whipped at him any harder, it would have fallen off, or would have held on by the cheer strength of her jaw clenching, her wide-eyed, her  _ rabid _ , straight on at him. The man, Bog, all six and a half feet of him, takes a step back. Ah, her  _ murderface _ must be showing.

“You heard the explosion, right?”  His mouth cringes apologetically, wide shoulders raising with worn leather rubbing on itself like mountains moving. “Contingency.”

“But, but…” she looks behind them, there the door dampens growling and scratching. No way she has enough bullets for this. There are too many, she will be swarmed. Even with the two of them, even with the advantage of the doorway-

 

_ they are of claws and teeth and baked burned skin, in striking deformities, shining ribs sticking out, hanging dislocated maws of their jaws, and white eyes, their madness staring back at her, murmuring with the voice of the Dessert, our wretched thing you are, scream for us, die for us _

 

-she thinks, fast, intense, like a gambler counting her cards -  _ you can take ‘em out of Vegas, babydoll, but you will never take the Vegas out of them _ \- her head exploding in a wave of migraine, rough, sharp, making her grit her teeth. 

The Wasteland has a very unique habit of fucking with her brain. 

 

_ part of us, one of us, die for us,  _ **_DIE FOR US_ **

 

Marianne kneels to the ground and closes her eyes. Blood rushes slowly through her veins, thick like the sweet syrup of Sasparilla concentrate.   

_ Alive _ . 

Carefully, she breathes: in-out-in. 

_ Alive _ .  _ You are alive _ .

Out-in. Out-in. 

_ Alive _ . 

 

A stray thought, that all it would take right now to knock her out, rob her blind and leave her for the ghouls to finish is one good hit to the back of her head, edges the outskirts of her mind, and she braces, when the man makes a step closer. 

“Hey, are you-”

Next moment she springs up, not even quite meaning to - or maybe very much meaning to,  _ you are no girl, child, you are an animal _ \- runner’s legs flexing, brawler’s hand curling and arching like an arrow away, crushing into his face, right on the silky burn pattern, and a week old pepper’n’salt stubble. 

“ **Fuck** !”

The dog barks, and hops in place. The man stumbles back, hand over his face. 

Then,  _ he turns _ .

It has been a while, Marianne thinks, since she has been weak to her knees, and even if she was, the reasons were more than trivial: thirst, hunger, sleepless nights. But this, it’s as if her very first Deathclaw stared back at her, deep shadows making his eyes glow iridescent blue, crooked sharp teeth bared and hands that are more like claws, back hunched and looming…

“ **Jesus Fucking CHRIST** ,” sputters this particular Deathclaw in a human body, and blood drips from the corner of his mouth and down his chin and Marianne tastes dust in the back of her throat. “Are you Right in the Head?!” He says, making a wide prowling step in her direction, sharp winded cheek twitching, and looking deadly pale in the low flicking of the vault lamps. “First you point a  _ gun _ at me, now you  _ punch _ me - and I’ve done nothing, NOTHING to you.”

Nothing.  **Like Hell** .

“ **There were RECORDS** !” she screams right back at him. 

His mask of anger falls on the ground and shatters, leaving just an array of visible scar-seams on a blank slate.

“What?”

“ _ Disks _ !  _ In Recreation _ ! Big round black things in the glowing box,” she makes gestures with her hands, indications of something, maybe the disks, maybe the jukebox, maybe something else entirely. 

“I know what a  _ jukebox _ is, thanks.”

“I wanted those!” She took a detour for this. A whole two hours worth of daylight. Just for some moron to blow it all up. And what did she have to show for it? A handful of bullets? Couple of cans? Abraxo? Fucking desk-fans?

Her leg stomps in frustration on its very own. 

“You  _ punched _ me,” he growls again, slowly leaning in, nostrils flaring, blue eyes wide and incredulous, as if they looked at her and _ in her _ and discovered that she was not a human at all, but new never-before-seen version of a sentient gekko. “For a bunch of  _ songs _ ?”

“’ _ A bunch of songs _ ’?”

 

Yeah, sure, but they were more than that. They were… like dreams, gleams of another world, so incredibly vivid and full, pristine and glittering, to which even the brightest city in the world deemed in comparison, like a crooked imitation, a reflection in smoke and broken mirrors. It exists, like Gods of the Old, in constellations of the night sky, in pictures of decomposing magazines, in rusting boards that she passes on her way, the world of chrome and glass and perfect beautiful people, who danced and smiled and laughed and  _ loved _ , and drove on their hovering cars on their lit roads, and came home to their colorful huge houses, white fences not even big enough to stop a roach and  _ they didn’t have to _ , and their robots were not deadly, and their  _ grass _ , their grass was  _ green _ , trees tall, and  _ flowers _ , they had so many beautiful flowers - not the bleak weeds she used to reverently put in her only vase and cherish as Roland’s cheap attempts at attention. Marianne could swear that sometimes she could still hear them, the phantoms of their fabulous lives echoing in the silver vault corridors. 

Because back then people used to have wishes and dreams and hopes. People had  _ futures _ . People  _ lived _ , and not  _ survived _ .

 

“…Whatever.” Disappointment stuffed as deep as she can put it, Marianne fishes a couple of shells from her breast pocket. Bitterness lingers on her tongue, as she cracks the barrel over her knee, purposefully not looking at the man with his long thin neck stretching quaintly as his head bows to the side, lips pursed and eyebrows flying over hooded eyes. Makes her reload her weapon a bit more roughly than it deserves. “Makes no difference now. Good luck with your life.”

Only as she crosses the archway she originally came from does he call to her.

“You mean these,  _ right _ ?”

She looks: the asshole stands in the middle of the room, one clutching the backpack - he probably had it under his cape thing - the other lifting up a large paper square, stuffed thick with familiar round shapes,  _ ruining them _ \- fucking Vaultie doesn’t even realize, how precious these are. 

**This fucking guy.**

Marianne doesn’t move one bit. Her lips part, spreading into a terse little smile. “You should not have done that.”

“Oh?” Bog arches a bushy dark brow.

Hers rises in return. “I’ll  _ fight you _ for them.”

The dog circles excitedly around his legs. His mouth opens, crooked smile returning. It mocks her, as if it knows something about her that she does not. Marianne isn’t bluffing. Marianne seriously wants to punch him in the face again. Or she could shoot him. But she promised not to. But-

“Sure you will,  _ Tough Girl _ .”

Ughh. He’s one of those.

“A nickname? Really? At least hunt me a ragstag first. Or better,” she shrugs and her bag full of stuff drops on the ground. “Save yourself an embarrassment.”

He squints, kneeling slowly. Arm with  _ her _ records lowers, the sight of his pipboy (older model, clunkier than hers, but not without a couple of homemade mods) not lost on her, but she tucks it in her memory for later while he sets the vinyl on the floor. “Feisty. And even look the part.” He sighs. “Unfortunately for you, I know how much these things are worth, and-”

The dog licks his face. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Dogmeat, today is just that kind of day for you, isn’t it?”

The dog barks and hops on one place, long tail swinging in tell-tale playful sincere excitement, that even Marianne finds hard to be mad at, because in it’s essence, it is one of the most honest expressions of love, sloppy, messy, saliva-wet  _ love _ \- at least as far as she got to experience, and the only one worth it, really. 

And Marianne, tension in her shoulders and gut releasing in a sudden spring,  _ giggles _ . It feels strange, like a bunch of little bubbles popping in her gut, and her hand flies to her mouth, but not fast enough to make her stop them from coming further. 

Bog pierces her with his eyes again, this time his expression unreadable, if not guarded. One of his shoulders jerk, like a jolt of pain zips through it. It makes her feel inexplicably guilty. Doesn’t stop him from attempting to prevent his animal’s affections. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, and puts her hand away. “Dogs - can’t live with them, can’t live without…”

“Yeah,” he nods, pensively. He puts down his weapon, tugging on the cape, held by hell knows what. “He’s a bit strange for a dog. Makes two of us, I guess.”

“Yes, you are very strange.” 

For some reason he seems offended. “Coming from a girl, who wants to wrestle a man twice her size for a bunch of plastic circles.”

He wants to add something else, something snarky and bickery, and so suitably him for a man who looks a bit like some angry dark vulture, but the door, the very one protecting them from a horde of undead mutated corpses, gives a creak. 

“Or we can do it somewhere else,” he mutters instead, hastily picking all his things back up, and Marianne quickly follows suit. “Before this place turns into Ghoul Central. Come on, Dogmeat.”

“Ghoul Central,” Marianne rolls it off her tongue. Tastes like good memories. “I like the sound of that.”

“Shall we?” he bows by her side, in a mock inviting gesture. She mock-curtsies in return, and pushes him to go first. 


	3. Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do you like pineapple?

The whole of the way back to the surface she watches his back, a wide spread of shoulders and a narrow waist, clad in polished black leather with dull metallic studs. On it, a large green viper curls in a S-shaped twist, its maws open to showcase sharp fangs dripping with venom. Partially washed away, wind-whipped and burned with the sun, it looks like the artist was familiar with the concept of snakes but never saw a real one, nasty little buggers, but Marianne can appreciate the dramatic vigor of the interpretation. All things considered, it’s a nice jacket. It has character, personality -  _ but so did a monochrome suit, _ she reminds herself. 

  
  


Marianne forgot many things, but the fucking monochrome suit never left.

  
  


Dogmeat bolts forward at the first peak of daylight, her companion shouting to be careful. Indeed, she hums, remembering about Dog, still probably guarding her mobile homebase outside. Unless it got hungry and buggered off. Which could have easily happened. Dog is a good dog, if not a bit special. Came with having its brain transplanted back and forth, if Marianne had to guess. Made two of them.

She also wondered what he would think about it, her truck. Vaulties, they _had_ _things_ , like an occasional Mr Handy, or books, or knowledge, long lost to the rest of the Wastes. She heard of things called “vids”, that were like music, but with pictures, sort of like Mr. House-

She spits out the sour taste that name produced, and keeps on walking.

  
  


When they step out of the cave, the world is burning. 

The dying desert sun, like a dramatic fellow that it is, spills glaring orange rays across the land, carving the world in two, one of scorching heat, as if the ground itself is about to combust, and another, in long sharp shadows it creates, where, it seems, the world already did, and is left to slowly cool down. All of that makes her truck look quite impressive, frankly speaking, and not like a rusty box on wheels it really is. It is almost  _ homely _ , how it stands parked on a hill, with dogs hopping around it. Dog holds itself admirably, despite its handicap. Their shapes, white versus brownish black, equal in size and in shape, whirl in a hurricane, chasing after each other, and maybe, Marianne ponders, she can look at that just a bit longer. 

Or at least until she crashes into a back of leather before her.

  
  


“That wasn’t here before,” he says, pointing at her truck with a strange note of worry. What worries Marianne is that he is surprisingly easy, almost  _ habitual _ , to move aside and continue walking. 

“Yeah, that’s mine. Dog too.” 

She goes on, letting wet slobbering tongue licking her fingers, _I_ _see you like your new friend_ , the door of the van creaking up a storm while she dumps her findings on the floor. Only then she notices, that he still stands, motionless, halfway between her and the cave, face blank, and sun-kissed in this light, wind catching on the locks of unruly hair that are, as she also discovers, slightly curly and white in places, like his temples. His scars, many and varied, recreate his topography anew, yet clash so vividly with the stupor she seemed to set him in, she has to bite her lip to stop a smile.

“What?” it betrays her, attracted by this man’s poorly managed composure. 

That  _ unlocks _ him. 

And he flies: a couple of steps - and he is by her side, curling his head, he is too tall even for her van, and sticking it inside, over her shoulder, and he is  _ very close _ , heat sipping from him like he is the heart of her Desert, a nuclear engine beneath leather and jumpsuit and white t-shirt, and a wide cage of ribs. 

“ _ Holy shit _ ,” he breathes at her ear, elated, while her heart drums under her breastbone, and her lungs constrict under the assault. “ _ Amazing _ .”

What is important, Marianne keeps repeating to herself, is that he is doing this not out on some agenda, or some cunning plan - she spend too much time in the Wastes to know the difference in her very bones - no, he is… honestly not minding her personal space at all. She should not punch him again. He is doing no harm. She is fine. 

Marianne swallows, spit sticky and thick in her mouth. “Um… thanks?”

“May I?” he glances down and she glances up, and fuck the fucking Atom, she should not have done that. She notes, how his cheekbones puff in excitement, eyes shining with the same sparkle Dawn has at the sight of sweets, such rare precious delights, even in the richest city on earth. 

She nods and looks away, like a coward she still is. A fucking smile of crooked teeth lights him up, exploding with his blue form in all of the reflections when he climbs inside.

Her truck is a pretty big truck. Not the eight-wheeler monsters lying overturned on the sides on the road, where you may find an occasional piece of old-world tech, but inside, she finds it spacious. Well not this man, top of his head scratching the ceiling, knees bend, fingers trailing walls, barraging her with questions he doesn’t even seem to need answer for. 

“Holy shit. This thing works? It drives? Did you make it?”

“I… no. A friend of mine di-”

“Good job, I mean it, Good Job!” He plops his skinny ass on her cot, springs groaning at his weight, head turning back and forth, taking in as much as he can. He won’t fit on it if he lies down, that’s for one. It’s only next that she questions why would he even be lying on her cot to begin with, this magpie of a human. “This is by far the most complicated thing I’ve- NO. You have a  _ weapons bench _ here.”

He crawls to it on his knees, pretty much dragging himself under despite such challenges as height and limited space. Still, he is weirdly sort of respectful to her stuff, not opening boxes or crates, not touching her junk. Okay, not touching her junk too much.

Climbing from under the bench, after examining the welding system, no doubt, his face is just slightly sooty. Her hand goes to her mouth, to lick the thumb because there is a smudge on his nose, but she corrects its course, rubbing her own instead. 

“Pretty great, right?”

His head jerks in quick succession of nods. Until his attention is caught by something else. 

“And a nav system?! That is is an honest to god working antenna up there? Unbelievable…”

Daylight dies behind her, sun swallowed at last by the horizon, and Marianne finds some will to climb in after him, stepping over her bag. The sound of opening cupboards brings him back from the front seats - away from a photo of Dawn and Sunny, in their pretty clothes as she announces them husband and wife (such a strange moment, but what can you do, when you are judge, jury, a minister and a mayor, all wrapped in one package - “you delegate” is the answer she finds only after the call of the Desert becomes unbearable) - attracted by the method of her ergonomic system, of dumping stuff in various drawers and later remembering, which is which. Her shotgun and rifle come last, unloaded and placed carefully into their designated locker.  _ Love your weapon _ , and so on.

“If you try to steal my truck, I’ll be very disappointed.”

The dogs seemed to bugger off somewhere, doing dog things, like hunting or something, and she squeezes past him to the ignition, listening to it purr. The solar panels on the roof worked another fine day, she notes, checking the charge gauges. 

“There’s a tiny switch on the ceiling,” Marianne adds, not turning, and as expected, something clicks behind her back. There is only one lamp - and it’s enough, she never needed more - stuck in a low yellow circle on the ceiling. It gives a weak orange glow, reminding her of a light on the old radio she had in her hovel-like decrepit house on the edge of the Westside. “ _ I can smell the desert from here _ ,” she used to say, when Dawn suggested that maybe her penthouse in a largest casino of the city is a better kind of accommodation.  _ You can smell it everywhere, we were born right in a middle of it. _ And Marianne would laugh because no truer words were said.

The man knocks against the glass with his nail, and shoos away a stray fly. 

“This is nice,” he says, his voice betraying distance of his thoughts. “But I prefer lighter travel.” 

  
  


And just like that, he jumps out and into descending night. And Marianne is left standing with her mouth open, gaping at the quickly growing gloom of the wasteland, chill already starting to slip through her bones. 

  
  
  


Her lips slowly curl to an  _ oh _ , and she rubs at the junction of her eyebrows as they tense up, like two waves crushing against each other, and suddenly, just like that, she feels so very much… alone. 

Alone with her bullets and guns and records, tucked away under her bed. No,  _ no _ , but she  _ likes _ it like that, she says, forcing some sort of a smile. She is better alone. No one betrays, no one lies, no one leaves to have a better life. Come on, she  _ made herself _ , alone, and she continues to do so. Also alone. 

 

(the Desert can not take away what it didn’t give. that’s against the rules.)

(Marianne doesn’t get attached)

(except when she does)

(Marianne also doesn’t cry)

(yet her chin quivers)

  
  


She shakes her head, hair in a bloom with what used to be curls and waves of a perm, shrugging off the tremor in her fingers. “No, this is stupid… I don’t- Why?..” And then, her blunt nails dig into her palm and her lower lip catches on her teeth, her heart going rigid and hurting her lungs - 

  
  


“ _ Damnit _ !”, she starts out of her van, teeth bared with “Wait!” that she has no reasonable explanation for. “Don’t-”

“-go.” The remainder of the sentence is caught on the wind. She turns in place, her feet valse her through the empty space before the entrance cave, and some distance away, her Dog barks at a bunch of cassadors - nothing it can’t deal with. The Desert laughs at her, whipping sand in the face.  _ Nothing lost, nothing gained, girl. _ Marianne tells the Desert to fuck off, rubbing specks out of her eyes - just sand, nothing more.

 

_ He comes and goes like the wind. He’s not yours. Don’t get attached. _

 

Her leg, in a brisk angry twitch, snaggs against a small rock and sends it flying over the edge of the cliff. A growl tickles at her lips.

“Should have shot him.”

 

“Well, that would be rude,” shouts the man out of the tall bushes on the side of the rock, pushing out something - and now it’s Marianne’s turn to gasp, displeasure thinning out like cigarette smoke, and arch her brow, because she never saw a real one, just the shadows of after-images from another time and place (okay, maybe she did, but they were usually in a rusty disassembled state) unlike this one: scratched chrome and dusty paint, but  _ paint _ , dark brown worn leather seats, large stuffed saddlebags in crude stitches (she can just imagine him, alone by the fire with thread and needle and a lot of frustration), and dear skies, it is a  _ motorbike _ . The man attached to it beams with pride. “There is still an issue of those records to be considered.”

 

Marianne counts her heartbeat.

She wants to say things, so many things, like 

 

_ don’t go (yet), you are  _ fun _ , most fun I had in awhile, and I need fun  _

 

but instead, she bites the side of her lip, and feels like a girl in a polkadot dress with small lacy gloves and a perfect wave to her hair: “Mind giving me a ride?”

 

And the man nods with a confused little shrug to his shoulders, and it strangely endearing (again). Marianne doesn’t want to think about how stupid or reckless this situation might look from aside. She only regrets that her only tea dress - how extraordinary that sounds, a  _ tea dress _ , as if the clock turned back a couple of centuries and then stopped, disorientated - hangs in Dawn’s locker hundreds of miles away. But the picture, as if ripped from some pre-war periodical is not complete without it: a boy in a leather jacket with a fine bike and a girl, except the girl is all wrong, a dirty mix’n’mash of parts, all broken. 

Marianne doesn’t know if even time will be able to fix that girl.

 

So instead she says: “Not today. It’s getting dark.” 

And dark it is, The Desert devouring light like it does with everything else, coloring the jaded teeth of far-off mountains in blood and rust. Still, she prefers it to cold gray of the dusk, where everything is deceptively still and your eyes may trick you hard enough you might actually die. So Marianne smiles.

“Do you like pineapple?”

“Pineapple.” Ragged eyebrow rises, but then lowers back, slowly, like mist in the valley right before things get clearer, eyelashes flapping at her in rapid succession. She likes to think it’s because of her, and her attempt to rip away her own layers of mistrust - and there are  _ layers _ , thick, hard, like a scab, and the only way she can get rid of it is by scratching away to the very bone, but he doesn’t need to know that, he doesn’t need her fucking problems - so she smiles wider, and is rewarded with a crooked toothy grin. 

“Yeah, I like pineapple.” 

  
  


But before pineapple, there are dried branches ripped off the nearest bush, stones collected and pulled in a circle and lighter fluid splashed in the middle.

 

“Radroach or a gekko on a stick?” she says, digging around in her cherished coolbox. Instead, when the smug silence behind her back remains as such, she turns to it with a scrawl and has a couple of boxes trusted into her hands. 

“This ain’t no radstag, but-”

 

He gives her boxes of frozen pre-war steak. 

This fucking guy.

“Oh,” Marianne whispers. “Well fuck, now I’m  _ swooning _ .”

 

“Be my guest, but not too hard,” his scarred upper lip raises slightly, as he waves the main source of their dispute in the air. “I figured I  _ must _ have duplicates. At least a few.”

“Give me a second,” a grill rack pulled from over the upper drawers - well, she calls it that, the structure of iron sticks welded together into something she could cook stuff upon - and nails it in the ground over her make-shift fire. The frozen steak - oh, by the Sand, when was the last time she had something like that? - is casually placed over it. Pre-war people knew how to make food that could last a lifetime or two. 

Bog perches himself on the edge on her open truck, face softly lit with the fire, eyes semi-closed. He hugs the vinyl with both hands, delicately pressing it to his leather chest. 

“This is… very nice,” he murmurs, almost to himself, yet not to her, but she nods in agreement anyway. 

“You are going to hate me for this,” Marianne smiles, but shoves him aside a little as she pulls herself back into the truck. She doesn’t even need to get on her feet, but to crawl under her bed, butt wiggling, and to pull out a large heavy plastic crate full of- “Treasures.”

 

Her guest does a half-turn. His face falls.

 

“... _ You wanted to fight me _ .” Brows furrowed, thin lips gently pursed, he raises his downcast eyes to look at her. Begrudgingly. “You wanted to fight.  _ Me _ . Are you mental? ...no, don’t answer that.” 

His hand stretches to her crate of miracles, but stops half-way, as if he is afraid that if he touches them, she might bite his fingers off.

Marianne huffs, and then, because a breathless cuckle is not enough, harks out a laugh. “I  _ know _ I have a problem.” But she brushes through neatly stacked square cartons because he doesn’t. “So what do you have there? Some Ella, maybe a bit of Nora?”

The man in blue pulls back, his spine straight with offence. “You have a whole bloody crate of records, there are at least forty of them here-”

“Fifty three, in various degrees of playability.”

“Well,” and now he puffs his sharp cheekbones, and oh dear, Marianne chews on her lip to stop herself from laughing some more, before it stucks her that there is no reason for her  _ not _ to laugh. He is being ridiculous. “ _ Finders keepers _ !”

“Fine,” her fingers dance, and she fishes out a few packages. “How about an exchange then?”

He ponders. He ponders and skims her wicked face and her put-up mischievously raised eyebrow, and sniffs, because the steak taws and starts to emit the familiar smell of burning flesh. 

“ _ Fine _ ,” he grunts. And then his hand stretches again, and now, he gently glides his middle finger along one of the vinyl sleeve edges and sighs. 

Marianne pretends her heart doesn't squeeze at the sight of him.

“Oh, I’m about to rock your world,” she  _ flirts _ , consciously - because it’s easier, because it’s mindless, because in a way it’s a bit of a haggle and haggling is  _ fun _ \- without batting an eye, and lifts the lid of the record player. 

He doesn’t reply. He looks at her like she just opened an ammo-box stuffed full. 

“Thought so.” And she pauses. “Whiskey?”

He shakes his head. So she passes him a Sasparilla instead. “Now, let me see what all the fuss is about.”

  
  
  


“You haven’t heard this one, really?” 

Marianne shakes her head. She could answer, but that would mean she would have to open her mouth, currently full of meat, quite good for something 200 years overdue, with a sweet and tangy surprise of mutfruit juice slashed on top, because otherwise, even with packeted salt and pepper sprinkled over it, her new acquaintance claimed that it would be a bit “bland”. So he dug out a fruit from the saddlebag, and squeezed it in confident stokes, and Marianne now swayed, from whiskey and juiced meat and a swinging tune, fresh,  _ new _ . 

(A song about love, but she digresses.) 

  
  


(She wants to ask, about the way he folds hands and closes his eyes, and moves his lips in quiet murmur when she passes him his plate. About three folded fingers moving from his forehead to the stomach, and from one shoulder to another. But she doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t care to explain.

 

Maybe she’ll ask him later.)

  
  


“GNR plays it on repeat. Mostly as a stupid joke to piss me off.” He grumbles over his own food, but doesn’t sound at all pissed off. 

“What’s GNR? Some station?” 

His fork - aren’t they so damn civilized, it’s  _ cute _ \- pauses halfway to his mouth. “... I tend to forget how far west I am. Sorry.” He eyes his food, before shoving it where it belongs. “Galaxy News Radio.”

“Figured you’d be from the East. People in here don’t talk like that.” Or act like that. Or share steak that sells for good money. 

He nudges her with his elbow. “No? What  **do** they talk like around here? With an unnecessary gun to your face?”

 

_ Sorry, babydoll, nothing personal. _

 

Yup, there goes her appetite.

“Yeah,” she sets her bowl on her knees. “Sometimes they even pull the fucking trigger.”

 

She expects him to laugh. But he doesn’t. 

Instead, he squints, and raises his hand to tap his forehead. She doesn’t get it at first, but her own hand raises, and the sharp tail of a scar puckers under her fingers, almost entirely hidden, but apparently not quite. 

The asshole has a good eye. The asshole has a very good eye, with jealousy-inducing eyelashes and, as whiskey notifies her, the stormy blue irises. 

“Hope he got what was coming to him.”

 

Marianne keeps her hand where it is, and then, in a twist of guts and alcohol and horrible dark humor, shoves her fingers into her falling fringe, and lifts the layer of locks up 

 

uncovering, uncovering,  _ uncovering _

 

(pulling the bandage)

(pulling the hairs The Desert blows into her face  _ you will regret this girl _ )

(pulling the scab off the wound)

(pulling the skin and the bone and the tissue apart)

 

the sharp white angle of the mending flesh that cuts in a wide lightning strike across her skull, where the hair simply refuses to grow, because this is her Desert, this is where the Desert is  _ inside _

(and probably is, Doc Mitch might have done his best, but sometimes she really feels like her head is full of sand, it scratches the back of her eyelids, it rolls on her teeth, it pours from side to side in her mindbox, like a watch counting back the time before the Wasteland takes her away for good)

 

“He was too dead to share his opinion on the matter. Thankfully.”

Marianne waits. Marianne wonders, and gets… not what she expects.

 

“Fair enough,” Bog judges, oh how he  _ judges _ , the slits of his eyes going thinner, before he turns his head and continues eating. 

And she sits, hair sticking out between fingers like an overdramatic idiot that she is. 

“What?”

“The man shot you, you shot the man. What about it?”

 

_ Fuck you, that’s what about it. _

 

And it itches on her offended tongue, strangely not spitting out, strangely, because it’s painful and broken and the Desert laughs in her ringing ears, in the crackling fire, in the meat, in the far off barking-

But Bog swallows, puts down his plate, and takes her fingers- 

and his are just as warm and dry and scarred as hers, just bigger, simply bigger, the scavengers hands, the runner’s hands, the trigger-pulling hands

-and pulls them to the back of his head, under his hair that is wire-thick except where it is not, except where the skin is bare and crossed by a trench of a healing seam.

 

“I get it. Really.” He still doesn’t look at her, and she takes it as a permission, to travel the full length of his damage, like a road, because she  _ knows _ roads. “It’s like… a patch over a hole, and a patch is good, it repairs the damage visibly, but not the nature of it, and the nature of it is a cavity that is still here, you can’t just fill that. It’s just there now.”

He puts the bottle of pop to his lips, and swallows in big gulp. She pulls on his hair, held together by grime and dust. She is not squeamish. There are times where hers were in even worse condition. 

“I get it,” he repeats. “We are all made of metaphorical cavities with patches stuck on top of them, like metaphorical swiss cheese, and everyone keeps ripping out pieces that are left, until there is nothing left of us and we are simply hollow shells of humans that are so much easier to crumble.”

“But,” he sharply turns his head, and flicks her forehead, “I am not going to crumble, so I am filling the holes under the patches. I am creating myself anew, and these patches, as interesting as they might me, won’t fucking define me.” 

“So yeah, a guy shot you and you killed the guy. But tell me about this,” he pointed behind her back, where the recorder turned languidly with a new exciting song. “This is your filling. This is you. This,” he knocked aways the door of the truck. “Is you. This phenomenal dinner is you-”

“-I think this one is more on you,” she sighs the breath she doesn’t remember holding. “I have like… two and a half decent recipes to my name.”

“See,” he flashes her a row of crooked teeth. “ _ This _ is you.”

 

And Marianne stares.

**This fucking guy.**

 

“...But I like my fucked up patches.” She brings her hand back, and flips her fringe to the side. And then, taps on the back of her neck. “Patches tell a story. I want to know the story.”

He frowns. “You won’t believe me even if I try.”

 

She leans forward, and winks from under her brow. “But do try me.”

  
  


He leans to her in the same way, murmuring in a low rumble of distress. 

“I was kidnapped by aliens and they cut out a part of my brain. And them I blew up their ship.”

  
  


Marianne shokes on her own drink. And then just cracks. 

“Tell me another.” Then, when the gaut face before her turns a shade of pink, because she can’t stop laughing, and oh dear, he thinks she is laughing at him, she stutters: “This is better than my story of a how I got my brain stuck in a jar and had a very shitty conversation with it.”

“...how?” His inquiry is very quiet and very very careful.

“It’s a very long story. There is also one where a bunch of ghouls asked me to send them to the moon. Or the one where this one guy tried to convince everyone he is me. ” 

The look he gives her becomes extremely pointed. “...I’ll take you up on the that whiskey offer.”

She passes him her bottle, and hyperfocuses on his Adam’s apple, bobbing up as he slowly down her supply. 

  
  


Marianne doesn’t move away.


	4. Part 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is the Magician.

“So I wake up and there is this…  _ Suburbia _ around me. Fences and houses and smiling people. No wasteland. No fallout.”

“Sounds…  _ delightful _ .”

“In concept. In reality, it just got exponentially  _ weird _ .  **Fast** .”

Their fire slowy turns to cinders. Nora purrs behind their backs - yes, they got to Nora because Marianne loves Nora, especially when drunk, especially when she manages to pop a can of pineapple without cutting her hand, and it goes really swell with a second bottle of moonshine they open, and Marianne digs up a couple of precious and colorful carnival glass cups from one of her cupboards, because Marianne was born in Vegas, and in Vegas they know how to party  _ in style _ . 

“I just don’t get it, sometimes,” teeth catching up on his lower lip, and a puff of buzzed embarrassment making him glow. “How people could live like that? It was so… so… clean.”

Dogs come back, and settle, curled, by their feet: brown and white fur, some wet with cazador slime, some with dog spit.  

“Maybe that’s why the world simply… collapsed onto itself?” Marianne grins, and enjoys the surprisingly warm laughter of the ragged man before her.

The man before her, who keeps telling her unbelievable stories, stories that ring some strange bells, yet bells that feel like a dream she doesn’t want to wake up from. But not just that, they talk, about some weirdest shit, about bombs and vaults, and friendly supermutants, and Wasteland cities, and the Wasteland itself, that is bigger than Marianne even imagined, maybe as big as the mythical Sea.

She likes how he gets softer around the edges the more he talks, like he is starved for an ear, starved for a conversation. 

[“A dog is good companion, but not the most talkative one.”]

How his hands move in the rhythm of his speech, and fingers curl, and how he bends his leg, and his foot twitches excitably. Marianne likes the awkwardly cracking neck, and a beak of a sharp nose he scratches, and how he keeps combing back his hair, salt and pepper and dust and rust. She likes it even when he suddenly bends twofold and groans into his hands (and the pineapple can).

“Are you okay?..”

Long fingers slide down his face as he looks up, and stares full of suffering into the distance.

“I’m... such an  **asshole** . We’ve been talking for hours and I haven’t thought,  _ even for a second _ , to ask for your name,” he whines, nasal and drunken-pitched. “My mother would have been so very disappointed.”

She throws her head back (banging it on the edge of her welding table) and chuckles, patting this head in a show of remorse. “It’s Six.”

He peeks at her through the net of crossed fingers. “That is not a name, it’s a number.” 

 

Did she mention that he is a smart-ass? A very intelligent, highly educated, she-doesn’t-even-understand-half-of-the-tech-stuff-he-is-saying-but-please-continue smart-ass. He is.

She likes that too.

 

“ _ I’m aware _ . It’s actually Marianne, but everyone calls me Six. Or The Courier.” 

He uncurls out of himself, the whole unbearable length-height of him. “So you are a courier and six is your number? Marianne, The Courier Six?” 

 

He thinks he is making a joke. 

He thinks, and then he doesn’t. 

(Probably because Marianne’s face is unchangingly patronizingly reserved.)

 

(Probably because Marianne  _ likes _ him, and she can say it a million times more, this uncharacteristically unexplainably charismatic man, but not Roland-likable, in glamor and clean lines, no - he is pleasant the way… Theo is, only without the spared innocence, like Steph, but without the torn-throat vengeful Mojave bullshit.)

 

( _ you like him, because unlike you, he is a genuinely good person _ )

 

(Marianne likes him, so she also likes to see him stuff his foot into his own mouth)   

  
  


“Courier Six.”

“Yes?”

“ _ Don’t fuck with a person- _ ”

“ _ -Who brings you your mail.  _ Yeah.”

Bog bows his head to the side. His hands grab onto his folded ankle. He stills.

  
  


At night the Desert grows cold. Marianne learned it a long time ago - or maybe she was born with that knowledge, passed to her parents from their parents, and even before, when her ancestors crawled out of Vault 21 maybe 200 years ago - but alcohol inflames the sensors under her skin, turning into liquid heat, and her pip-boy beeps with a notification of an intoxication. As if she doesn’t know. 

Because she is so very warm, and she starts to undress, unzipping her jacket (good thing she is not wearing the damn star-spangled coat, that would have given her drinking buddy a start) and flinging it into a general direction of the driver’s seat. 

The Desert embraces her, with still warm air, and with a sigh, Marianne lets it. 

  
  


“Huh,” he finally raises his voice. “I’ve heard things.”

“Don’t get too excited,” she flexes her shoulders, rolling them back and forth, up and down, letting all her scars and cuts and bruises  _ breath _ , eyes closed. “Most of the stories they tell are overblown.  _ Most  _ of the stories.”

He fumbles with his coat. “I didn’t-”

“You are not the first. No one expects a short skinny girl with a shotgun. That’s how I get them. Beware the small ones.”

“I think they also say that about mole-rats.”

She kicks him in the shin of his non-folded leg. She doesn’t miss.

“No, but that’s good,” he rubs his skinny calf with a wince, and she even opens one eye to watch him. “That means you probably could help me with directions.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“West.”

  
  


(to the Mojave, to the Desert exterior, from where not all travelers return)

(to New Vegas, with lights shining, and cards folding, and caps rolling)

(the opposite way)

  
  


Shiver runs through her, leaving flustered field of goosebumps. “That’s a very general idea.” 

“Well,” he sets his cup on the floor, and pulls himself outside, stretching, and she has to look, he is right here, miles of legs and hips and torso, and  _ shoulders _ . “To be clearer…”

 

( _ Now? _ )

( _ Not now, please not now, not yet _ )

 

He digs in the side-bag on his bike, parked by the side of their camp, and produces a thick folded piece of something. 

“Behold,” he says, like he is about to unfold a mystery of the universe before her.

She beholds, skeptically. It’s not enough.

  
  


Bog, the man in blue and leather and road wrapped around him, holds on the corner of his bundle and then flips, and the thing unfolds into 

 

\-  _ he is the magician _ -

 

A Whole Damn World.

  
  
  


It’s map, a Giant Fucking Map, “of the Unites States of America”, so much bigger than what she has hidden in the front compartment by the steering wheel. It’s bright in signs, and reflecting with dimmed burned colors of orange and green, and covered in hand-made polka-dot of marks, and names and dotted lines of trails. 

“I want to connect the coasts, and my pip-boy decided not to agree with this much info in the memory drive, so...” he says, sitting himself back. The Map lies spread on the ground like a carpet, and Marianne suddenly thinks:  _ this is what it feels like to be a bird, to have a world in the palm of your hand. To have a world and cradle it like a child. _

He looks at it, like it  _ is _ his child, with so much love, the crow feet in the corners of his eyes becoming trenches, the mountain ridges, with rivers of blue within them.

 

“Why?” her voice crawls out of her dried throat. 

He breathes, eyelashes lowering, and rubs his face with his hand. “As much as I want to,” his index and thumb pinch the bridge of his nose. “It’s futile to try to fix everything. But I still try, which makes me very lucky, but still a moron. This just seems like the first and easiest step to put us back together.”

 

And Marianne wants to laugh. Because she is a Courier and she delivers, but who is going to deliver her? 

The Desert?

 

_...or maybe this fucking guy? _

 

She scrambles back into the yellow light of the truck, Bog follows her with a confused crease on his forehead. She returns, with a paper bundle of her own, and another treasure, that makes his eyes wide, and her chest squeeze. 

“ _ No way _ .”

“Yeah way. Now lift it.”

He does, the large paper hanging between them like a curtain, and she pushes the button, shutter snapping, hoping she is not too drunk to focus, both herself and the camera in her hands. “Got it as a gift from our local photographer.”

The paper lowers, and his incredulous head peeks over the edge.

“Your local...  _ photographer _ ?”

“Welcome to Mojave, where we are full of surprises,” Marianne grins, pressing her map into his chest. “I come from the city that never sleeps and doesn’t like when you mess with its business.” She switches her attention back to  _ his world _ , going backwards, to the beginning. “And you, you come from-”

 

A pause. She stutters.

He unwraps  _ her land _ and takes it all in, like a man who suddenly found the light. 

And Marianne,  _ she knows _ . Something long forgotten tells her - of swamps she never saw, and people she never met, and a man, a man who’s not what she expects, and  _ everything she wants him to be _ . 

“You come from Capital Wasteland?”

 

“You heard of Capital Wasteland?”

“In stories. Our caravaneers don’t go that far - they don’t even go  _ this far _ , that’s why I’m -” 

  
  


_ Look at her. Look at her and her suddenly absent spite. _

 

“-Have you met him?”

“Met who?”

Ragged warrior type. Tall and handsome and full of legends.

“The man from Vault 101. The Lone Wanderer. ”

And in the most give away manner, baby’s first failing steps at bluffing, Bog stammers. 

“Why do you ask?

 

_ Really, why?  _

_ Won’t change a thing.  _

 

Nora hick-ups. Marianne snaps her head to the player, and crawls inside the truck, away from her uncomfortable questions - because she knows her stupid is showing, or at least she thinks she knows - and his reactions to them. 

The disk is spotting a nick she doesn’t remember having and she sighs, taking it off and hiding back into the carton to put on something else. Something else that finds it’s way to her hands on a get-go, and -

“This is my song,” she bites her lip, “Always gets my spirits up.”

“Do you have superglue?”

She turns as he carefully folds her map, in all the right creases. His fingers rub together, pressed in a squeeze, as if holding something, ah, a  _ superglue _ , yes. 

“Why do you need superglue?”

He passes her the map and proceeds to cover his face with the same long defined fingers (burns and calluses and white spiderweb of scars and  _ she knows _ ). His head bows. “Cause there was a guitar in one of the lockers back in the vault, but the bridge dried off, and I’m all out of glue, so maybe if you had some, I could fix it and maybe play you my song in return.” 

That’s a whole sentence that he manages to squeeze into a single breath, and Marianne is impressed, but the sand under her skin sparkles in hundreds of tiny explosions and she says something completely different. 

 

“ _ You know how to play a guitar. _ ”

 

( _ of course he does _ )

 

“Well yes, when you grow up in a vault where nobody can leave, you do anything not to die from boredom-”

“I think you are a second person I’ve ever met who can play songs.” 

“Wrote a couple of my own even, not as good at these but-”

“ _ You… write your own? _ ”

 

She must sound really delighted - 

 

(absolutely breathless, teeth gidding into her lower lip, and mouth dry - but not sand dry, just so very  _ very _ thirsty)

 

\- since his hand crawls up his face, and he combs through the hairs of his fringe, held back by his goggles, and them pulls it down, strands poking out in different directions, sticking to his glittering forehead, his eyes downcast.

“Music is really a thing for you,” he groans into the heel of his palm. 

Standing on the edge of her truck, Marianne comes to a sudden, most miraculous conclusion: they are the same height like this. Also, that she feels really bothered when she can’t see his eyes. Hand gripping the roof, she leans forward, and reaches, her finger wrapping around his wrist, softly pulling his hand aside, and he looks too stunned to move away. So she leans even closer. 

Marianne is drunk enough to know that her cheeks are aflame, but so are his. It’s alright.

“ _ I’m giving you all of my superglue. Let’s fix that guitar. _ ”

  
  


And then it is an hour later, and Marianne is pretty sure they both are covered in glue, but they are sitting on the edge of her truck, under the moon that is too small for such a dome of cloudless night sky. Their fire long turned to embers. The guitar, battered and scratched but salvaged, lies behind them, and the “bridge” - a small wooden plank, but that’s what he calls it, so that’s what it’s called now - is glued and pressed down with her crate of vinyl to “set”.

 

Marianne can fix up a gun, change a lightbulb, manhandle a safebox to open, and sort-a kind-a glue back something that fell off. 

But Bog-

Bog seems to know how to fix EVERYTHING.

 

“When I was sixteen, they wanted to stick me into reactor maintenance. I don’t think that it was a good idea, a teenager manning the main source of power in the Vault, but yeah.” Another Sasparilla whirls in the bottle, and he lifts it to the moon, watching the bubbles dance up in the silvery white light. “My Mom was not ecstatic about it. At all. I think she shouted something on the lines of ‘ya’re getting irradiated only over ma cold dead body’.” 

He harks out a laugh - it flashes his teeth, sharpes his profile into something otherworldly nostalgic, yet unexplainably sorrowful, the color of his eyes mocking the moon in its comparative bleakness. “Little did she know, the first thing I did when I got out of the Vault was dip maself headfirst into an into a puddle of irradiated water.”

“...why in the world-”

“ _ Moira _ ,” he passes a shudder. “That woman was just… I was nineteen year old smartass with an adequate skill of shooting radroaches with fake bullets - and suddenly, there were  _ mines _ . And raiders in a supermarket. And I just- I think I have a copy of that damn book somewhere.”

“What book?”

“The book Moira -  _ Moira Brown _ \- wrote. Wasteland Survival Guide or something.”

Marianne’s drink goes all the way up her nose. “Bullshit,” she elegantly cracks, and falls on her back to shuffle under the bed. “This is such brahmin crap, I don’t even know. I’ve read this book a billion times - and I mean it, a  _ billion _ , there are quotes in it that are pure gold,” the book - a bit more than a booklet, gaudy yellow cover, hand-copied, really battered, with soft edges and missing corners, and creases down the front - flaps in her hand. “‘ _ Scorpies, itsy bitsy scorpies _ ’ - there should be a trophy for the use of language such as this, no sane person would call them  _ ‘scorpies’.  _ And if I’m right, the author of this masterpiece is not Moira Brown, it’s-”

“Moira wrote the damn book. I was too busy paddling through supermutants and mudcrabs and the ruins of the Capital looking for my mother, the very same woman who was kind and insane enough to name me  _ Richard _ .”

“Your name is... Richard B. Saor?..” She has to read it at least three times with her inside voice to make sure she isn’t missing any letters.

“One and only.” He drinks some more. And then, with a pause - “I hope so. Can’t have nothing but pity for a poor bugger with that kind of name.”

 

[In the short time of in-between - all-encompassing in-between, made of months and Desert and painful variety of people - Marianne learns one small huge thing: mouths lie, like there is nothing else better to do, every single tooth, every single tongue, sometimes not even meaning to. And so do eyes.

But hands, they can’t. Hands tell stories, and Marianne, she is good at listening, to the way fingers wrap around a glass surface, and how the corner at the heel of the palm protrudes, and how the puckered vein dances under sandy skin. Hands don’t lie.]

 

“As much as I would like to think that you are just fucking with me,” she says, and an azure iris flickers to the sly corner of a webbed eye, and Marianne, she decides to not even fight the wave of  cocky mirth it brings her. “You really  _ aren’t _ .” 

She flips the Survival Guide on the weapon’s bench. 

“So the question still stands,” and she scoots just a tad closer - and he doesn’t move away - and bows her head to peek up at him. “Have you ever met him?”

“Met who?” he grins, knowing perfectly well who she means. So she shoves him with her shoulder. 

“You know who! He is the one thing from Capital Wasteland everyone and their mother knows about around here. And if you really are from there, you  _ must _ have met him. At least once.  **Spill** .” 

 

He does - and Marianne starts to notice this about him, it usually takes her longer to start seeing these things about people - the very opposite of what she wants of him.

 

“Why is this so important to you?” he asks, tugging on the zipper of his jacket - how is he not dying, it’s so hot - which brings Marianne to the tan line on his neck, and the boiling warmth of a sunburn as she presses her fingers to it, and receiving a very low cringing hiss. Well, this will sting tomorrow. She could give him some of the salve she keeps in case of fire-related emergencies. 

She even might. If he asks nicely.  _ Or starts answering her fucking questions. _

Marianne pokes him in the neck again, dodging a narrow palm that tries to swat her away. “Why are you being so stubborn about this?”

“Because The Wanderer is a very complicated  _ construct _ and, as one extremely stubborn woman told me today,  _ most of the stories are overblown _ .”

Elbow popped on his shoulder - wide shoulder, warm shoulder, she grins. “Aww, are you trying to protect my feelings?”

Thick dark eyelashes fall and rise again. Long nose wrinkles. “Well, maybe I am?”

 

Marianne purses her lips, eyes trying to figure in the semi-dark the patterns of wrinkles on his forehead. Her arm slips, as she pulls back, into herself, fingers crossing and entwining before her. 

“Well… maybe don’t. I’ve handled worse. Much worse. The news that the Wanderer is a very pretty fiction won’t be as devastating to me as I might have suggested previously,” she says, and looks away from her hands, folded, tame, resting on her lap. “Pity though.”

Bog stays silent, his jaw moving, from hard to soft to hard on the edges of her peripheral vision. Marianne decides to listen on a Desert instead, the murmur of sand and dry weed, and a far-off growls and howls, the life of a Wasteland she knows in its darkest hour. It’s lulling, mind-clearing, even with a bitter aftertaste of disappointment on her tongue. 

 

But then, a hand lands behind her back, and Bog signs through his nose right by her ear.

“Thing about fiction: only a part of it is, in fact,  _ fiction _ ,” he sucks in his lips, realisation of so many bad choices that are being made right this second written on his face, Marianne feels all of them,  _ sparkling _ , but also, her clasped fingers loosen, and then pull apart, to fist into the rough cloth of her pants. “The other one is a very very tired man who in not very fond of dealing with people because there is always something that suddenly happens that he has to deal with. Because he can’t just let it be. Won’t feel right.” 

“Oh, I feel that,” she frowns, pulling the bottle out of his fingers, and drowning the last sweet drops. “First there is a dead brahmin - next thing you know you are hiking up the mountain because there is a deathclaw that ate a stealth boy and now it’s an _Invisible_ _fucking deathclaw_.”

With a soft choking noise, Bog’s forehead presses to her shoulder - and she has to sit very straight, and he has to bend quite far down, and all the sensors of her arm-chest-neck go into overdrive - his words gruff and rolling from the roof of his mouth.

“...what the actual fuck is wrong with your Wasteland?”

Her elbow bends, and she flick his ear. His fingers wrap around her wrist, and encircle it like a band. 

“It’s an acquired taste.” 

Bog’s eyebrows move against her skin, and a head on her shoulder rolls, to look at the barely visible glow of her forearm - the empty one, not weighted by a pip-boy of her own, and she fans out her fingers. 

“Tell me about him.”

 

Bog thinks, his thumb moving up and down her pulse, as if feeling something - and maybe he even does, a coppery mesh through a sheen of thin skin and scars. Then he rocks himself up with a huff.  “Constantly unprepared? One would think that after a few years that would get old, but nope.” 

But he is kind, words coming out like he talks about a relative or a friend, someone simultaneously familiar and frustrating. 

“What else?”

“He just… wants to make this world a better place,” Bog sits back up, rubbing his hands together again, skin against skin making sounds like paper unfolding. “And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes he miscalculates. Because he is, after all, just one man. And then he gets pissed of that people tend to forget that. And then he gets upset that  _ he _ forgets that. And then he goes off to attone for that by trying to fix everything again. So it goes, the vicious circle of an idiot with a Messiah complex.”

“And yet, he  _ persists _ ,” Marianne murmurs, awash with... something, that for a moment makes her absolutely undeniably light. There must be something in her eye, sand, if she is to guess, and she tries to rub it out, breathing damp. “Thanks, I think I needed that.”

Contrary to what she feels, the man in blue tenses. “As I said, Marianne, the Wanderer is just one man. One stubborn man, desperately afraid of disappointing everyone around him.” 

Marianne puts her hand on one sharply folded knee, and chuckles, perhaps more at peace than she has ever been. “He never disappointed me before.”

“Really?” 

 

Bog’s fingers twitch around the lowered collar of his jumpsuit, uncertain, worried, indecisive. It takes him a moment, eyes trailing softly over her face, and wishful easy eyes, and the smile he gives her, like an execution order signed, is small and sad. Fingers stop, and hand moves, raising the collar. 

 

“And now?”

 

 


	5. Part 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm really really good at tracking."

 

101 shines at her in bright yellow letters, reflecting all the light it can find and then some. The collar stays up, probably returning to its natural state, as Bog looks down his cup of whiskey, and downs it, face turned to the night sky. 

“Y-yeah, but on another note, the moonlight is never this nice in the Capital,” he says. His finger -  _ trembling finger _ \- points up above his head to where white lines of constellations, pale like old scars, cross the dark violet-blue. “Have you ever thought that Milky Way looks like a healing wound?”

  
  


_ Marianne thinks she knows all about wounds _

 

(the line of white across her skull puckers and itches, under the fringe she grows out to cover it, not because she is ashamed, but because she doesn’t want to share this, _her_ pain, _her_ story, with every single person she meets,  yet _just like_ _that_ she shared it with him already 

 

**he is the Wanderer**

 

he knows , because this is a story of a dead girl running, and the wasteland dwellers have a thing about their dead things remaining dead)

 

(but he is a part of a story of a dead girl before she became one, from the time before,  _ the opposite land _ , where everyone except for her were ghosts in flesh, and he was a  _ Vision _ )

 

(yes, Marianne is not a faint of heart, and she understands that a lie could be so  _ so  _ **_colourful_ ** )

 

(but Marianne knows that The Desert has a shitty sense of humor)

 

(and Marianne doesn’t believe in coincidences)

 

( _ he is a genuinely good person, Marianne _ )

( _ unlike you _ )

 

She grabs the man in blue by the collar with 101 stamped on it in  **sunlight** \- 

it crumples in her hand, as if this is a way she can test his worth, the sturdiness of him, and if the seams would rip, so will he 

 

(the Wanderer’s seams won’t tear,  _ never _ ) 

(unless she tears them for him)

(she is good at breaking things apart)

  
  


\- and yanks him towards her person, and bites into his mouth, into the scars and cracks, and tastes surprise, moonshine, 

Sasparilla, and pineapple, the sweet tang of her girl-dreams, and even the air around him smells different, wet dirt and wood, not dry but  _ living _ , coal and stone and concrete dust, and she can swear she can taste the dampness that is sipped right into his very bones, it’s sharp metal note, like a drop of water from the rusty pipe on her tongue, or maybe it’s the blood from his barely healed lip, and he makes a sound from the back of his throat that vibrates through the cavern of her mouth, a farewell to a thought - 

 

_ yet, this is a wound she doesn’t remember having. _

  
  
  


Marianne doesn’t know if he is kissing her back. Marianne doesn’t care if he is. She cares that on the inside of this kiss  _ she _ decides to give and take - 

 

without regret, without a second thought, in this great nothing of the Desert breathing into the nape of her neck in quiet anticipation of wrapping ghostly fingers around her throat and wringing it 

 

Marianne finds his mouth to be on hers to be... satisfyingly climactic? No, not quite.

 

Just… perfectly  _ very good _ . 

  
  
  


And on that note, she pulls away. 

  
  
  


Marianne looks at the sky. “Yeah, a scar. I think I see it.”

 

She lets go of the collar. 

  
  
  


Marianne waits. And then waits some more. 

 

And then she turns her head becaume the man by her side finally decides to take a breath, and to swallow, and to simply continue existing, but maybe in a state of some minor trauma, because his narrow nostrils are flaring, and he claws at his stupid jumpsuit, stupefied, like she almost ran him over with her truck, or maybe she really did, and he just waits for her to put him out of his damn misery like a roadkill that he is.

  
  


Okay, it really wasn’t as bad as he makes it look.

  
  


Okay, maybe it was a super asshole thing to do without a warning. 

  
  


“Sorry,” she finally says, when the boiling point of her own self-loathing is achieved. “I know only how to intimidate people. My social interactions are not very varied. It’s usually a sharp remark or a sleigh of a fucking hand - and I know I should have asked first. Sorry.” 

  
  


Bog breathes out.

 

“The last girl who did that - well, the  _ only _ girl who previously did that - asked me to never come back,” he says quietly, and Marianne, for some reason, clenches her teeth so hard she almost hears them cracking. “Had a gun pointed at me and all. And to certain degree it was upsetting, since we pretty much grew up together, and I liked- I  _ was madly in love  _ with her. But then again, I had to shoot her dad in self-defence. Understandably, she… didn’t take that well.”

 

Bog turns his head, and frowns at her. Hand rises, and presses a thumb to the corner of her mouth. He rubs at it, frowning, with a reopened bleeding lip. 

 

“So,” Bog says. “I think it became a habit after that.”

  
  


_ Marianne thinks she knows wounds. _

 

_ Yet here she sits, the self-appointed queen of fucked-up relationships. _

  
  


“ _ Sorry, babydoll _ ,” she smirks sourly, and presses two fingers to her forehead, to the scar,  _ black and white, a basic pistol, a rich brawl _ . “ _ Nothing personal _ .” 

  
  
  


Her fingers flicker like a gun, and fall back onto her lap. 

  
  


Bog’s eyes are wide, like to two blue moons. Something akin to anger flashes on his features, eyes trailing to her scar as if he is calculating, recalculating, but when they descend, they do so all the way to her mouth, her sardonic lips, and pause there. 

 

For a bright second the man smiles, the very tip of his tongue touching the crack on his lip. He does look kinda silly and sort of lost. And Marianne feels ticklish all over, in all places, and in some of those, she feels her body growing very very  _ tight _ . 

 

But then it’s gone and he looks away.

 

“I’m not the staying kind,” Bog says. The corners of his mouth fall and a small crease forms between his brows. It’s very… apologetic, for the lack of other word.  

  
  
  
  
  


(Arcade, witty snark aside, has a theory, that the single fact of somebody existing in the space conditions that space to change)

 

(Marianne can’t explain it, but there are times, when she feels like there is a choice to be made, a choice so important, that it might change not only her fate, but the fate of a Wasteland itself around her)

 

(it’s always a gamble)

  
  
  
  


( _ you can take them out of Vegas, but you can’t take Vegas out of them _ )

  
  
  
  


“Well, I’m not asking you to,” Marianne replies. “But if you ever think about coming back for more? Tough luck, buddy. You’ll need to track me, and I mean, look, we are on the edge of one shitty desert, and I have plans too, and those involve hauling this rust bucket all the way to the Capital Wasteland and whatever else is in there because there is trading to be done or I will not hear the end of it from Steph who’s been buggering me about new trade routes for months and-”

 

She stops, her mouth still open. Her next words should have been somewhere on the line of not planning to settle near Ghoul Central for the rest of her life when there’s shit to be done and stuff to be delivered, except,  _ expect _ -

 

\-  _ except the man before her looks at her like she is a shooting star and he is making a wish _ , his face frozen between childlike trepidation and old-man’s delight, and the edges of his overlapping lower teeth show from under his upper lip when he states:

 

_ (Dear God, if you give me this one thing, I’ll be good and I’ll listen to my mom, pinky promise, no backsies) _

 

“I’m  _ really  _ **_really_ ** _ good _ at tracking.”

 

So instead of her monologue, Marianne feels a moronic smile popping, because it is funny (and her lips and teeth and tongue are itching to kiss him again, to touch him again, to breath and taste and let him  _ flood her _ , and she doesn’t think once would be enough, maybe a few times would do, or a  _ hundred _ for that matter): “Comes from being an idiot with a Messiah complex.”

  
  


Bog produces a single breathy earthy laugh. And Marianne realises that she fucking lost it. Gone. Kaput.

  
  
  


She looks back - she doesn’t like to look back, but watch her do that repeatedly because of  _ this fucking guy _ \- to the mess that is her home on wheels.

 

“You are so not going to fit on that bed.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_ He so doesn’t fit on that bed.  _

  
  
  
  


[ _ the first one is a dust storm, the first one,  _

_ and the only one,  _

_ Marianne comes to a conclusion  _

_ she ever got lost in _ ]

  
  


Also: Vault-tech jumpsuits are apparently a heaven to exist inside but an absolute hell to get out off.

 

Also also: being bend over the weapon’s bench is as hot as one would imagine. Which, in a world where you have to make your own bullets if you want to kill a man, is pretty damn fucking hot. Also rather deep on philosophical level. But mostly hot.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Okay, it goes something like this-” 

 

One hand squeezing the griff, the fingers of the other dance over the strings and produce a line of notes that he hums over. She feels it, from the sole of her bare foot, pressed against his shoulder, up her bare thigh with a blooming bruise, through her torso, wrapped in a leather jacket - not  **a** leather jacket,  _ the Tunnel Snakes Leather Jacket _ , this absolute nerd sitting on her floor rug notifies her - to the back of her head, leaning against the wall of her home on a cot that turned out to be even more useless that she originally planned. His whole body vibrates in a soft tremor, and her toes curl against him, the warmth and scar-tissue softness. 

 

Bog sings a song…  _ about love _ . 

 

It’s of the old world, clearly, and Marianne almost wants to say that it’s so not him, but a verse in  **it is** so very much him - stupidly, in the same way her song is  _ hers _ \- in the soft, calm strum of chords, and words that are not that varied, but he sings them in a quiet low rumble, so fucking lovingly, she almost starts singing along. 

 

Marianne pulls herself up, forward, fingers combing through his hair. Her lips press to the rim of his ear. “Sing it again.”

 

“I would like to make it clear that there is more that one song in my repertoire,” his head turns, and her lips trail to his sharp cheekbone. Eyelashes that she barely feels flatter against her skin. “But who am I to refuse you.”

 

His fingers move again, but Marianne quickly lets go. “One moment,” legs untangled, she kneels by his side over the edge of her bed, digging under it, supposedly looking for her pip-boy. She is about 80 percent sure that’s where it rolled in her rather hasty attempts to take it off earlier. 

 

“What are you doing?” Bog regards her, pointy chin leaning on the curve of the guitar in his lap. 

 

Her fingers finally catch on a familiar clasp. The exhale she makes as she rises up is nothing but calmly triumphant. “I’m going to record that.” 

 

“I have a theory,” he grins at her and her naked protruding clavicles, and the valley of her breasts between the lapels of his garment. “We may blow each other up continuously, but as long as we continue creating things of culture, any sort of things, there still will be some hope left for us as species.”

 

Marianne moves off the cot to shuffle through the bottom of one of the drawers. 

 

“Can barter be one of those?” Thankfully, the holotapes didn’t change as much as the marks of the pip-boys did, and she had a couple of spare ones about, especially since she learned how to wipe them clean for future use. 

 

“I… guess? I’m not the best of barterers.”

 

“I once saw a friend of mine barter a bag of sand for a brahmin. It was absolutely beautiful, I think I cried.” She dumps herself before him, her crossed ankles over his. Her pip-boy beeps happily as she plugs a tape into it. 

 

“Is that good?” 

 

“Bog.” She touches his knee, knobby and skinny and pale and sharp and she just…  _ okay _ . “We are in the desert. Made of sand. I shoveled it up myself before we came into the shop.”

 

His lips pull into a pout, and that makes his cheekbones higher, chin sharper and for a moment she considers -  _ blasphemy _ \- skipping the song altogether. 

 

“That’s…  _ not nice _ . Really impressive, but... ” 

 

“It’s a  _ hussle _ . And a permanent solution to a temporary problem we had. You had to see Steph’s face when we later came back and bought that same bag of fucking sand for a price of a decently sized brahmin. You know how much a brahmin costs around here? She wanted to murder me right there in the shop.” 

 

Bog’s shoulders flinch, and he bites something back, head bowing to the guitar, before he hisses out “...just  _ why _ ?” and proceeds to hark out something of choking laugh that becomes a normal laugh, maybe be just a touch on a side of a fit, and she ponders tapping him on the back, when his head rises, and a back of slender wrist - he has such delicate wrecked wrists, like a painter thrusted with a sledgehammer - wipes away the dampness of his eyes. 

 

“It’s so… unnecessarily convoluted, as if… social interaction is a form of sport to you. Is it?” he chuckles. “ _ I love it. _ ”

 

This _fucking_ **guy**. 

 

“Play the damn song, Bog,” she remembers that her hand in still on his knee when she feels her own nails dig into skin that is just a tad colder that hers and that produces not an unpleasant inhale. “Or I will find something else to busy your mouth with.”

 

Bog doesn’t disappoint. He simply puts the guitar aside.

  
  
  
  
  
  


[the second one is an antithesis: 

her head half-hanging from the edge of the truck, and above her 

are just stars and blue eyes 

and her mind is clearer than it ever was before] 

 

[best part? for once, starts are just stars,

and he isn’t]

  
  
  
  
  


“Are you alright?”

 

The bedding, pulled off her cot and onto the floor, folds under her back, and one of the ridges digs into her rump, and she probably should fix it already, but there is a large slightly tremoring body on top of her, narrow bony hips cozy between her slick thighs, face pushed into her neck, and two large palms, open and narrow, flush against her lower ribs, very long thumbs caressing the scarline under her meager breasts.

 

He doesn’t answer, just breathes, controlled and slow. Shuddering. 

 

“Bog?”

 

“You- That thing- I-” he makes an attempt, a failing one. “ _ I’m ok _ .”

 

Marianne raises her hand, digging her nails into the scruff on the back of his head, over the seam of a scar. He… makes a sound, like a mix between a purr and a growl, and she has to stab her teeth into the soft cushion of her lower lip, humming.

 

Her lips find the sharp tail of his messy brow. 

 

“It’s alright, there’s still time,” she says, and hides her glances towards the pip-boy that is once again under the stupid bed. There’s time. A couple of hours or so.

 

And they just lie there. 

 

“This is a very well-made quilt.” And to prove his own words, Bog lifts himself - head-shoulder-one arm- _ her ass _ \- and drags the aforementioned quilt from under and over both of them. “Soft.” And then goes back down like a long piece of timber that she suspects he really is. 

 

“My sister made it,” she replies, arranging herself under and around, and follows the edge of the seam in the patchwork over his shoulder blade with her fingernail. “She has a really good eye for like-” Fingers, brought together, tap against one another. “-putting things together in a way that’s nice to look at. Keeps telling me to stop dressing in rags. You, she’ll  _ like you _ .”

 

His face raises of the crook of her neck, and it’s a bit worse for wear, hair sticking out in a clear sign that she has been pulling on it a lot. Blue eyes squint. “How so?”

 

“You have a style,” Marianne trails her sight down his neck, with scars and burns, and fresh, very obvious imprints of her teeth, until she reaches the thin white chain crossing his clavicles, holding a small round medallion. She drags her fingers down his chest to touch it. “Dawn has appreciation for… what’s the word… aesthetic- What  _ is _ this thing?” The medallion is no bigger than her nail, and it’s hard to make out the drawing on it in the moonlight, but as far as Marianne can tell, it’s a very crappy rendition of a Man with a Stick.

 

Bog pulls it out of her fingers, pressing it to his lips. “Saint Christopher, the Patron Saint of travellers.”

 

“Why is he carrying a midget on his shoulder?”

 

“A mi-  _ what _ ?” He turns it around to have a look. “This is  _ Jesus _ , Marianne.” 

 

Apparently her stare is blank enough to warrant a more indepth response. 

 

“Jesus Christ. Our Lord and Savior. From... the New Testament?”

 

Marianne raises both eyebrows. Her eyelashes flutter. Up-down-up.

 

“The Bible?” Bog makes the last meek attempt.

 

Marianne purses her lips and shakes her head.

 

He tilts himself to the side, then looks up, over her head, chewing his lower lip. His fingers slowly, pensively, pull the strands off her face. She uses the moment to trail her fingers lower, to the lone bump of ending chest bone, followed by a dip of solar apex. 

 

“You are not familiar with… Christianity,” he finally masters. “One of the most widespread religions before the war.”

 

Oh,  _ that _ .

 

“You mean the Old Gods? I’ve  _ heard of them _ , if that is what you mean.” 

 

“ _ Old… Gods. _ ” He repeats, and most cautiously, as if tiptoeing around an answer he really doesn’t want to get, Bog thumbs the protruding bone of her hip. “...So what  _ new _ gods do you believe in then?”

 

He is solid and wiry and coiled like a spring, muscles of his abdomen tensing by the minute against hers, but his eyes wander (though not trailing too far from the long thin scar right beneath her breasts, perhaps the biggest of the ones Doc Mitch left her with), restlessly over her form with a soft sad kindness, as if trying to find something telling, some kind of a giveaway-  _ OH _ .

 

Marianne raises her hands up over his shoulders, oh those fucking shoulders, and, grabbing him by the ears, pulls his face all the way into hers, so close the tips of their noses smudge against one another.

 

“For fuck’s sake,” her breathing comes ragged at an increased weight upon her. “If you want to ask if I am a Child of Atom, just ask it already.”

 

“Well, uhm,  _ are you _ -”

 

“I would rather throw myself into the Great Divide than worship a fucking Atomic Bomb. Do I look like a moron to y-”

 

The rest of the sentence drowns in the mouth that presses over hers and  _ opens _ , and she struggles to remember what she was even getting slightly angry about - as if it would have been so difficult to notice if she was irradiated off the charts while they rutted on this super flimsy mattress - while the tongue in her mouth does incredible, if not rather inventive things, that leave her gasping, and a brush of a fuzz on his cheeks burning her face - breath, breath, don’t die, you are just  _ kissing _ a man, just -  **ah** . 

 

“ _ Bless _ ,” he says, lips pulling apart from this assault, his forehead to hers, and he is not even out of breath (much). “I already started to mentally train myself to an idea that the most fascinating woman in the world might be a radiation junkie.”

 

“Flatterer,” she mutters to best of the ability her ravared mouth allows, lets one of her arms fall down on his back, between his shoulderblades, and  _ claws _ . 

 

The whole of him shudders, and with a whine, soft and throaty, falls right where he was in the beginning, right where he is supposed to be,  _ while they still have time _ . 

  
  
  


“ _ I believe in Myself _ ,” she shares into his ear. “I _ am the Strive. I am the Speed. I am the Wind, that runs through this Wasteland _ .”

  
  
  


The stars above her are white with a tint of yellow, and the sky, deeply cloudless, becomes just slightly less dark and endless. 

  
  
  
  


_ Desert breathes over her, and presses a dry airless kiss against her mouth. _

 

“ _ I have spurs _ ,” Marianne replies in the words of her song, tickle on the soft inside of her cheek. “ _ That jingle-jangle-jingle… _ ”

  
  
  
  


[the third time, Marianne discovers that Bog is a son of two scientists - one of which worked as a doctor for the most of Bog’s adolescence -  and his mother would have been very disappointed in him if after all the books he read, his knowledge of female anatomy would have been insufficient to figure out what a G-spot is and how to find it;

 

that is his very mouthful explanation of the things he does with his fingers;

 

and she needs an explanation because Bog’s fingers turn out to know more about her -  what do you call this? She has no name to describe it, but she is sure there is one - than she does, because with little to no effort he achieves results that she would fail to reproduce for months to come, but that is in the future and right now, Bog the son of scientists, with an air of highly important experimental research, fingers her into arching weeping moaning mess. 

 

And then, to add an insult to the injury, the asshole puts his face into the mix.]

  
  
  
  


Bog makes the best bed. Not in a sense that he knows how to fold covers - he is just the right combination of hard and malleable for her taste in vertical surfaces to lie upon - or maybe she is so very tired of her shitty single bunk of a half-bed -  so this is what she does, stretching herself down the length of his back, lips pressed to his trapezoid.

 

The man himself rocks slightly, shifting his weight from one forearm to the the other, sucking on the tip of a blue pencil that he uses to carefully copy marks from  _ her _ map to  _ his _ , as well as into a small book he calls his ‘travel journal’.

 

“Are you sure that thing is not poisonous? Your tongue is turning blue.” Her palms slip down his sides to squeeze the narrow of his hips and back up, over the rippling of his ribs, and she rubs her face over the triangle of his neck and shoulder blades, marveling at how he immediately tries to make himself comfortable again. 

 

“These are probably the best thing the Communists came up with,” he raises the pencil in question over his shoulder. “Though I think they were supposed to be used for space travel. You know, because pens can’t write in space.”

 

“But we are not in space,” and no, she doesn’t know. But she knows if she straddles him, she can rub her hands up and down the trench of spine the straining muscles of his back make and that absolutely murders him. In fact, as he plops himself back on the mattress with a most beautiful of moans buried face down into her folded quilt when she count the string of vertebrae bumps with her thumb, Marianne chuckles and reaches forward to press her finger into his work. “Don’t go there, it’s a ghost town.”

 

“Marianne, I swear, you are just exploiting that trick now,” he raises his head and folds his hands under it. “But you have it marked as any other.”

 

“It was, until the Legion walked through it,” she swallows away the stale taste of spit in her mouth. “Actually, I think someone was planning to do something with it, like open a pit-stop casino, or a caravan base, but that would require cleaning out the crucified people and the raiders who are too high to give a fuck. I tried, a couple of times, but the assholes keep coming back from  _ somewhere _ . Probably would have been a good idea to let NCR roll in, set up an outpost with a guarded perimeter, but that would have given them ideas about their stance in the region. So yeah, this is a town that is sort of always on fire.” 

 

Beneath her, Bog chuckles into his fist. 

 

She pinches his raspy cheek. “What?”

 

“I’m just going to stop questioning the way you do things in your Wasteland,” he rolls to the side, slightly, and stretches his neck, hand reaching back and stroking the outside of her thigh. Then, fingers searching around the floor, he thrusts her with a pencil,  _ his _ pencil. “Your turn?”

 

“My turn,” Marianne accepts, and pushes him back down, and bows to pull on the edge of his ear with her teeth. “I’m going to write swear words all over you.”

 

“I trust them to be flavorful,” he replies and stretches, joints popping haphazardly. 

 

At dusk he is grey-brown, soot and dirt, tan and not tan in clear divides, where tan is darker than the sky above, and not tan - ash grey, as if she has to touch him with just the tips of her fingers and he would crumble. Still leaning forward, opening her mouth, Marianne drags her tongue down the back of of his neck, and lower, the line of saliva glittering over his skin, tasting dust and drying sweat. He tries to arch his back at her, immediately pressed down by her sharp elbow. 

 

Marianne writes her name, one large letter below the other, down the trail she left. 

 

It starts to smudge before she’s even finished. 

 

“That is not a swear wo- .” She bites at the start of his lower back, and he hisses in a sharp exhale. “ _ Fuck _ .”

 

“But that is,” Marianne smirks, and draws in a swelling red of her bite a pretty swirly six.

  
  
  
  
  
  


[“You are going to thank me for this later,” Sunny crack a smile so wide and white she is blinded for a short moment. His hands, small and rounded and sturdy, with short fingers, take a deck of cards and with a burst of casual superhuman deftness  _ twist-turn-twist _ . “Are you looking?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“No, you are watching, not looking,” he shakes his head and pulls out a Queen of Spades, holding it up between his index and middle finger. “Your card?”

 

“Yes. Again.”

 

“Your turn,” he passes her the shuffled deck and she repeats, for a millionth time.  _ Twist-turn-twist. _

 

A six of clubs falls on the table between them. “Your card?” she chuckles with a cringe, and the rest of the cards follow. “And this is why you are my casino guy.”

 

Sunny bows his head to the kitchen table and groans. “For a hundredth time, Marianne, I’m not your ‘ _ Casino Guy _ ’.”

 

“Why not?” she opens a Sasparilla on the edge of a table. From her left, Dawn glares disapprovingly and returns to the colorful mess of cuttings on her lap. “I have a trader guy, a scavenger guy, a sniper guy,  _ the _ doctor guy, a smartass of a science guy and a huge green agriculture guy. I even have the makes-me-eat and judges-all-my-morally-grey-decisions yet still loves me guy-”

 

“That’s me.”

 

“Yeah, that’s your wife there. So why can’t you be my casino guy?”

 

“Because I am a shuffler, Marianne!” His hands fly over his head and shake in disdain at the ceiling. “I shuffle cards, I don’t know how to manage casinos! Or a town of casinos, for that matter.” He points at the glowing lights shining through the huge panoramic window. 

 

Marianne collects the cards in a pile, then in a deck, and then,  _ twist-turn-twist _ , messily. “Well, I didn’t know I could kill a man. But then I tried. Because it’s a skill that I thought to be useful to have.” Twist-turn-twist. “And practiced. Because practice makes perfect.”

 

_ Twist-turn-twist. _ She,  _ finally _ , pulls out a Jack of Diamonds, holding it up between two fingers. “Your card?”

 

Dawn laughs, blond curls falling over her face. “Just give up, baby. She is not going to let it go.” Her sewing hands don’t stop even for a second. 

 

“ _ Fine _ ,” Sunny rubs his face, and takes away her bottle, drinking half of it. “But only because, first, Dawn asked, and second -  I really want you to stop hustling me.” He pulls the deck out of her hands. “Yeah, that’s my card. Wanna learn another one?”]

  
  
  
  


[ _ Marianne learns sleight of hand because she thinks it’s another good skill to have than can be applied to a whole range of activities _ ]

  
  


[ _ the fourth one is an attest to that _ ]

  
  
  
  
  


And then their time runs out.

  
  



	6. Part 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marianne will let the Lone Wanderer go.   
> (knowing full well that she might never see him again)

The Lone Wanderer sleeps through the dawn, his back rising and falling in tides. He is a quiet sleeper, and a deep one - she unwraps herself from under-around him without much trouble, the weak barely-grunt in her ear accompanying his change of position as he rolls on his stomach and nuzzles into her pillow. It is a different matter to step around him, long arms thrown around, but she manages, pulling her pants of the locker and over her legs, and leaving the shirt, a checkered nightmare with missing buttons, handing off one of the front seats. 

 

Bog sleeps, and Marianne spends the moment she doesn’t really have to look at how the surface of his high forehead clears, and how his lower lip, with healing cracks, hangs down, exposing the edges of his lower teeth. Her fingers itch to touch the corner of his mouth, where drool dried and caked, but she stops herself. 

 

Unlike her, Bog sleeps like a damn baby. Well, one of them has to. 

  
  
  


The air smells of sunrise. 

 

It’s uniquely fresh and chilly, and almost flowery sweet, unlike anything else Marianne has ever tried. It licks her tired scared skin, kisses her bites and bruises, and fills her lungs, as her fingers dig through the remainder of their campfire, combing through soot and coal and collecting it, handful, into a bowl she keeps on top of one of the lockers. 

 

The dogs, curled around each other in a heap by the wheel, raise their heads and one of them even manages to wag its tail questionably but stops as Marianne presses a finger to her lips and shakes her head. 

 

Another handful, now sand, goes into the bowl, and she rises, Wasteland’s air clearing against her bare chest, walks, calmly, to the drop at the edge of the hill, and sits, legs folded, her face turned to the shimmering pink of the horizon. 

  
  
  
  
  


Marianne looks at the Desert. 

 

The slack of a knife against the palm of her hand makes fat drops fall into the bowl and she mixes in all into a dark mess, that cakes when she plasters it against her forehead, and it falls, in chunks, on her chest, stomach, thighs. 

 

Marianne smells blood. It’s her own blood, but on the larger scale of things, it’s still blood,  _ only blood _ , and she spilled enough of it to know that there isn’t much difference to the Desert, because that’s all the Desert wants:

  
  
  


Just Blood.

 

And maybe someone to talk to.

  
  
  


Marianne looks at the Desert. And closes her eyes when she can’t take it anymore, when her eyelids tremble, when the emerging sun tears into her, scorching the earth, both around her and  _ within _ .

  
  


Marianne looks at the Desert and closes her eyes.

And through the white circles on the inside of her eyelids, the Desert looks back. 

  
  


They talk.

  
  
  
  


When Marianne opens her eyes, Bog sits on the rock by her right side and watches, and she is startled, ever so slightly, because somehow this man, with untied laces on his boots and the top part of his vault suit hanging down his back, wide elastic riding low on his hips,  _ somehow _ managed to be absolutely silent in his approach. Or multiple approaches, as she notes her horror of a checkered shirt over his lap, two tin cans with mystery meals by his feet, and a wet rag that he passes her way. 

 

“Good morning,” he grunts, yet wears a cautious smile, and as his hand turns empty and draws a pattern in the air between them. “May I ask about this?”

 

“You may try,” she smirks, closing her eyes as she wipes her face (but mostly because Bog’s gaze keeps travelling over her, down the mess of dirt and sand and soot and blood, from her forehead to her nose-cheeks-neck-chest-abdomen and back up, and she can feel it in a memory of his mouth making the exact same trip). She keep her face straight. Her nipples betray her. She blames it on the chill of the morning. “Though there’s not much to talk about.”

 

“Certainly more than a deep intellectual debate about what would you like for breakfast.” 

 

“Breakfast? Sounds more interesting already.”

 

Picking up the tins, Bog weights them pensively. “Well, on one hand, I could offer you this delectable CRAM, seasoned by centuries of nuclear fallout-”

 

“ _ Delectable _ ,” Marianne repeats, mimicking his haughty tone, and curls, as a laugh, a first laugh of the day, rises out of her in a whole wave of shuddering shoulders and hair falling over her face, oh, when was the last time she started her day with such a laugh.

 

“Truly,” Bog nods, his lips pursing slightly, and lively tender sunlight explodes in the irises of his squinting eyes. “And on the other hand, I have this portion of canned beans that may not be a choice meal of the most, but as years have proven time and again, they too can provide an... unforgetable experience.”

 

Her lips curl, as she bites them, stifling another wave of chuckles, yet, rag turned out, Marianne presses it to her chest with sigh full of dramatically deep sorrow (ruined only, perhaps, by her inability to stop herself from smiling at the moment). “How could I ever make such a choice?” The rag leaves a streak of dirt that she examines with disappointment. “...this might have been a mistake. I think I need actual water.”

 

It is quite surreal, this man she met just yesterday yet somehow feels like she knew her whole life (or wanted to have know her whole life), to discuss breakfast with their newfound casualness in this very early of the morning, and how his eyebrows, dark but missing in places, come together in a frown, as he, too, stares at the rag and her chest and the dirt marks (and scars and burns and freckles, but also her  _ breasts _ , and she is torn between an urge to cover herself, she can’t be this open, this  _ unprotected _ with anyone, and a desire to never let him turn away,  _ look at me, look at me, never stop looking at me _ -

 

“...can I help you in any way? Unless you are willing to try your luck at the showers of Ghoul Central.”

 

Now that’s a thought. “I hope the ghouls won’t mind. I certainly won’t turn down a hot shower.”

 

Marianne picks herself off the ground, and then immediately regrets it because her legs have fallen asleep. They buckle right under her, and she tips over to the side, fully prepared to make another large bruise on the right of her thigh. Or not. She sways, that is true, but the dry and cracked land is replaced with two palms, and cans drop on the ground instead of her, while hands grab and squeeze,  _ hard _ , harder than intended yet hard enough for her to  _ feel _ , and she finds herself holding on to a wide bony shoulder. Momentarily, the man beneath her raises one panicked look, fingers unclenching, but the damage is done and switch is turned, and when he opens his mouth to surely apologize, she is already saying something belonging to the night before and the nuclear explosion of sensors all around her lower body: 

 

“Wanna join me?”

  
  
  


She expects one of two things: a polite refusal, what happens in the truck near the abandoned Vault of Ghoul Central under an influence of decent food, good music and pretty long dry spell on both sides stays in - well you know the saying - or a very enthusiastic agreement, because she has seen this look before, this reserved kind of hungry, and knows what it means, Sunny has this look when the wind blows through New Vegas and lifts the skirt of her sister’s dress, exposing to the world the skin of milky white thighs and knees, and so does Cassidy, when the familiar power suit with froggies decompresses, but that is none of her business. 

 

She wouldn’t mind either: the voice of the Desert, loud like silence, is partially right - she can not keep him, no matter what she wants in the matter, and they both have places to go and things to do, and  _ she cannot keep him _ , so he either is going to make it easier or not, but -

  
  
  
  
  


Marianne will let the Lone Wanderer go. 

 

(Knowing full well that she might never see him again)

 

Marianne will let him live. 

 

(without her)

  
  
  


[ _ Soon _ .]

  
  
  


The Lone Wanderer, the Bog-Walker, the Water-Bringer, in turn, remains sitting with his mouth open. The fingers on her hips flex, and wide eyes stare up into hers. And then, of-fucking-course, he does what she doesn’t expect. 

 

Richard B. Saor turns bright disturbingly fetchingly  **maroon** , all the scars and lacing burns and the crow feet of the wrinkles in the corners of his large honestly open eyes. It spreads as far as his ears and neck, and maybe even a little bit on his chest. Marianne would have thought that a man who spend the part of last night getting familiar with her... anatomy could not possibly have the audacity to flush like that, but  _ he does _ .

  
  
  
  
  


Dogs bark, now fully awake and enthusiastic, and chase each other into the desert to look for food. In the distance the cazzadors, whatever left of them since yesterdays encounter with her pet, buzz in distressed unison. The desert sings the song of the road with moving dust and rolling bushes.

 

Marianne, in her turn, finds out that one might, in fact, get embarrassed to the point of severe heart palpitations. 

 

In an attempt to salvage the leftover of her dignity, one of her hands slams over the face of the man she keeps pretending she can set aside like any other. It helps, but only just enough to stop Marianne herself from keeping on looking at him.

 

“...Alright, no,  _ nope _ , redacted. Not with this attitude,” urgently righting herself, untwisting feet, awakening legs, she pushes herself away, yanking her shirt to her chest. Her next words are already muttered to the van, where she  _ knows _ she has to have a bar of soap  _ somewhere _ . 

“I’m getting a shower, and then I’m making an omelet that will blow your mind…”

 

Behind her back, Bog coughs, getting back on his feet. “I don’t think I have any left to be blown-”

 

“ _ NO _ ,” pulling herself out of the van, a new shirt (still horrible), chemically smelling soap and a washed out green towel with fringed edges pressed to her chest to cover herself, she points a finger in the direction of his figure and beelines towards the Vault’s entrance. “Nope, too late, I see right through that… Whatever that is now!”  The bike, parked on the side of her van catches the light of the sun in the curve of the steering, and immediately the image of Bog from last evening, leather jacket and slicked back rust hair, comes back to her mind. He still owes her the bike ride, she remembers. 

 

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Marianne groans into her towel, and ducks in the dark underpath, thankfully silent. 

 

Something hits against her truck, softly yet rhythmically, three times in a row. She doesn’t turn to look at what it was. She is not  _ that _ stupid.

  
  
  


Fortunately and unfortunately, Marianne does not get murdered by ghouls while taking the most scorchingly hot shower she can achieve. The rad meter of her pipboy beeps once or twice, but mostly stays silent through the whole process, meaning that the water filtering system was not affected by core decompression (or something like that, there is science behind it that is very much out of her depth to understand, not that she cares to apply herself to the process) and she might even replenish her water supplies before going back on the road (and she probably should, who knows when she will get another chance to get a few gallons of purified water on her way). 

 

And with that the matter of sorting out her affairs is settled and all is left is that sinking feeling that something… is broken. Not common way, no - 

 

\- this is not her usual damage, this is new and fresh and she would, and could, and maybe even should, compare it to the unmentionable kiss of a gun to her forehead, yet somehow, it’s her holding a gun now, and this is how it is different: neither of them deserve this, or maybe both deserve this in another verse altogether (if snarky men in sorta pristine lab coats are not wrong and there are other worlds with other lives and in those worlds Marianne is whole and not a collection of pieces and Bog is not the most important person she has even encountered) where they meet to never part, or  _ better _ , where they are together from the very  _ beginning _ ,  _ always _ , and she can be sure that nothing will ever take him away. 

  
  
  


But the Desert doesn’t care, if he is her lover, or her friend, or her kind stranger with pocketful of miracles. 

 

And he will go as he came. 

 

And she will let him. 

  
  
  


(Marianne knows not to get attached)

 

(doesn’t mean it’s easy)

  
  
  
  
  
  


It is not easy, especially when she emerges back to the surface and observes the Saviour of the Capital Wasteland fuss over a fire, unfortunately now with a t-shirt on. On the pan, something meaty and something orange-red comes to cooked condition that is signified by a collective change of color to a deeper hue of brown. 

 

“What is this madness?” she leans over his shoulder when he crouches down to scrape the mix, and almost makes him go right into it face first.

 

Bog turns, weight pressed onto one of his knees. “Since I didn’t get your final word, I decided to go wild and - you might need to sit down - mix the CRAM and the beans  _ together _ .” 

 

“As a true scientist in whatever generation,” she climbs into new home, hiding her things, and opening the coolbox. “You just don’t know when to stop.”

 

He chuckles at that, as if nothing is wrong, except she purses her lips, a pair of eggs in her grip, and relives, vividly, the scorching bliss of fingers moving and cracking bruised bitten-kissed mouth on the curving wave of a long scar right under her breasts-

  
  
  


Never before has Marianne thought that she would have problems with controlling her urges. 

Until this fucking guy.

  
  
  


“Alright, is your meal of misplaced ethical morality done? Because you are about to have your life changed.”

 

She ain’t going to ask how come all of the two plates she has are clean, or why the spewed mess of bedding that was before is now tucked and neat and proper, returned back to her unusually tiny mattress. Her van is just slightly more organised all over, in small things: tools on the workbench not scattered, but actually hanging on their respective hooks; her box of vinyl closed and tucked carefully under the table, and the case of the player wiped and placed lovingly on top; her bowl,  _ the morning one _ , hidden back at the the top of one of the lockers, all of them firmly closed. 

 

And it’s so stupid, and somehow so  _ him _ , that Marianne wants to laugh. That this man, with damp loneliness seeped into his bones she can still somehow taste on the tip of her tongue, has more control over his life and surroundings than she does. It’s so sad she wants to laugh, and maybe also cry a little. 

 

She makes her only good dish instead, and pushes back the feeble self-indulgent hope that he will be impressed.


End file.
